


anyone can see the road that they walked on is paved in gold

by roxast



Series: a little bit louder now (an fma college au) [4]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Codes & Ciphers, Coming of Age, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Missing Persons, Mystery Kids, like a goonies/stranger things/stand by me style friends fic, loose usage of the term body in the summary, lots of cats lmao, no spoilers but also no dead people, nothing to be squeamish about but??? suspenseful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:47:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22108099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roxast/pseuds/roxast
Summary: “So, enough allowance to pay for new spray cans every week, but not enough allowance to pay for bail, got it."“He’d have to get caught first,” Ed admitted with a cynical laugh, waving vaguely towards the mouth of the tunnel toward the light that still shone through the trees, through the overcast sky. “And it’s not like anyone comes down here anyway, except us.”[Or: Den finds buried treasure, Winry and her friends find a body.]
Relationships: Edward Elric/Winry Rockbell, Mei Chan | May Chang/Alphonse Elric, mostly adolescent pining because this is a gen fic
Series: a little bit louder now (an fma college au) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1402201
Comments: 25
Kudos: 55





	1. hungry

**Author's Note:**

> me: wow i can't wait to post this one-chapter standalone about the elrics and their friends!  
> the one-chapter standalone: (turns into three chapters)  
> me: :0
> 
> (parts 2 and 3 will be out by the end of the weekend! adulthood is a nightmare)
> 
> this fic is mostly good as a standalone, but obviously is connected to a greater college au, which may clear up some of the details not obvious in this chapter
> 
> check out fan-art of au ling, lan fan, and mei here!: https://bunsik.tumblr.com/post/189770314312/how-many-archetypes-hypebeast-goth-girl
> 
> title from this fic comes from the song "the way" by fastball

“Hey, are you doing anything after school today? I have a surprise I want to show you, if you want?”

‘If you want’. Aha. “If” “you” “want”. HA – _imagine_. 

Now, Mei Chang considered herself an educated woman. Not just smart – plenty of people were smart – but knowledgeable, well-informed on a variety of topics and, at the very least, confident enough to hold her own in unexplored territories. She kept a small but well-stocked First Aid kit in her backpack and she knew how to use it. She could speak Mandarin almost fluently, and with some more study, could probably come to write in it too. Her street smarts were, well… she was certainly book smart, with her lofty goal of reading through the school library’s Young Adult section being well underway by October, and it wasn’t as though she’d just skimmed through, no, Mei had taken diligent mental notes.

This was how the story was supposed to unfold, the method tried and true with every season’s most anticipated coming of age novel marketed specifically for impressionable young girls. Mei, the protagonist of her own life, obviously, was supposed to move to a new city, the smart but shy new girl, beautiful but didn’t know it (now, Mei was more self-aware than this, she liked to think, but on the other hand, modesty was indeed a virtue). She would excel in her courses (check, even if her new English teacher was tougher on her essays than her old one), and whatever after-school activity she so chose (martial arts club, check) and she would make one or two friends with students who weren’t popular but weren’t targets for more attention (like Lan Fan, who also liked martial arts and also spent all of her tickets on candy at the arcade). All of this would happen a few chapters or days before she caught the eye of the tall, dark, and handsome bad boy of the school (Alphonse?), who every other student must warn her about (rave to her about?) because they don’t see his warm heart under his mysterious and cool exterior (because he was notoriously good-natured, particularly in comparison to his busybody of a brother).

This moment, right now, of walking out of school on a cool October Friday, was supposed to lead to Alphonse inviting Mei to a Halloween party of some kind, thrown by a somewhat obnoxious, if one-dimensional high schooler who’s parents were out of town. The surprise was supposed to be a walk to his favorite spot in nature, like a sunny knoll in the woods covered in wildflowers only accessible after crossing a bridge of stones across the local creek, and he would – gasp – have to hold her hand to guide her across the water. Sensitive. Romantic. Birdy would sing the song that plays for this scene in the movie.

Except Alphonse was occupied, as he needed to carry his lunch box in one hand and guide his movements with his forearm crutch in the other, so there’d be no hand-holding if he wanted to keep his balance (that was fine, there was plenty of time to hold hands in the knoll, obviously). Alphonse was also well-liked at school, outside of a few bitter bullies, and while he was taller than his brother and had a boyishly handsome face, heaven knew he had about as much roguish appeal as a golden retriever puppy in a bow tie rather than, say, the classic literary hero, Jacob Black (which was to say, none at all, but that was also fine) (it was FINE it was fine don’t make her BLUSH). And nothing about him struck her as being particularly mysterious, other than the fact he sounded especially metallic today (something unusual was jingling in his backpack, like the click of tap shoes on a stage).

“Okay, so sometimes my dad and I go walking by the creek, and we found this spot one day a few weeks back,” Alphonse begun to explain; they were standing at the top of a rocky incline, about twelve feet tall, that led down past a few trees to the running water of Aquroya Creek. Leading the way, Mei watched where Al meticulously placed his sneakers and crutch between jagged rocks and dry mud. “We’re from Resembool, which is kind of to the north-northeast from here, so living right by the woods is already kind of different because I was used to seeing nothing but rolling plains and grain fields for miles and miles –“ the way Al could describe things, Mei thought, gave a mental image as clear as a photograph – “but this one spot in particular, where we’re going today, it’s really special.”

A special place. A. _Special._ Place. He was taking her to a special place. This was not a drill. Wow. Play it cool, Mei, play it cool. “Special how?” she asked, chipper yet curious (success!).

“I don’t want to spoil anything, but you’ll see, you’re gonna love it!” Al replied, enthusiasm palpable. Once he was close to the bottom of the incline, he tossed his empty lunchbox to the side for the remaining few steps, turning to offer his free hand to Mei, his smile as warm as the gesture.

What if she just died? Right here? Here lies Mei Chang, she held a high school boy’s hand in the woods once. Sorry Uncle Scar.

“I’m excited!” is what she replied with instead, gracefully taking his hand for all the support she didn’t need. She grabbed his discarded lunchbox on the downswing to carry in return, letting go of Al’s hand in what she thought was a cool and reasonable amount of time.

They headed upstream against the soft current of the creek, footsteps almost muted as they tip-toed atop a wide bed of moss. “Almost”, however, was the operative term there, were it not for the _clang clang clang_ coming from Alphonse’s backpack with each step he took, a sore thumb amongst the green. The one little strange detail, perhaps, Mei’s novels did not prepare her for.

“It won’t be far now,” Al assured, gold eyes scanning the terrain before his naturally inquisitive expression clouded over something? Sheepish? Shy? Mei watched his smile wriggle as he stammered, looking down at his shoes, up at the trees, and with his height, clear over the top of her head.

“This, uh…“ he was stammering; Al’s cheeks were prone to reddening quite easily, though they seemed especially rubicund at this particular moment. “This isn’t, uh, _weird_ , right?”

The carefully braided buns of hair on Mei’s scalp did not budge when she tilted her head, perplexed. “What do you mean?”

Al coughed a short, pained laugh as he stopped walking to turn towards her, face to face and rather stiff. “I’m just, uh, embarrassed that I was so excited about the surprise that I didn’t even think about how this might look, you know?”

Mei blinked.

Two blond brows furrowed at her. “Like, taking a girl to a remote area of the woods and all…“

Mei blinked again.

“You know… _alone_.”

Quite suddenly, she realized what he meant, and responded (very coolly) with a sharp intake of air through her dropped jaw.

“Ah, no! This is fine!” (Al could be so considerate and everything, worrying about her reputation like this, worrying about her at all.)

(Her cheeks felt red, was her face red too?)

(Of course, Alphonse only had the best intentions, he was very honest and honorable!)

(And it’s not like they were even supposed to kiss yet! They were just friends!)

(Oh god, was he trying to kiss her? Or was he trying to tell her he didn’t see her in _that_ way?)

(What _did_ he mean? And which was worse?)

(Mei didn’t know if she was ready for her first kiss.)

“Are you sure?” Al asked, effectively snapping her back to reality with his earnest and assuring tone, if still matching in her frantic energy. “If you want to leave at any point we can turn around and go back, of course!”

( _Red Alert!!! WEE WOO WEE WOO don’t FUCK this up!!!_ )

“ _No!_ ” Mei replied much louder than intended, a few _no’s_ echoing between the trees. “I’m fine, this is fine! I didn’t think anything of it either, so don’t worry!”

Al exhaled with a soft _whew_ , halfway to relieved, “Oh, okay—“

“Well,” Mei was kneading the handle of the lunchbox she carried for him, her face absolutely and undeniably red now, “I mean, I _kinda_ did –“

“You did?” Any relief disappeared in an instance; Al suddenly look mortified, so Mei felt even mortified.

“I mean, I read books and stuff!” she sputtered, and Al blinked himself from embarrassed to confused. (Strong save, Mei, now just make it make sense.) “So I figured, whatever the surprise was, the worst-case scenario would be that I—“

“—would be murdered?”

“ _What?_ ”

(He’d mentioned it before, where she’d first mentioned her goal of reading through the teen lit section of the library, that he’d read through the school’s whole Agatha Christie collection.)

(Mei thought people held hands and confessed their love in the woods, Alphonse thought people got murdered in the woods.)

It was a low call, barely above a whimper, but had evidently been loud enough to pull Mei and Al back to reality and away from their anxious banter.

“ _Meow.”_

The cognitive dissonance of hearing what sounded like Xiao Mei, an indoor cat through and through, all the way out here by the creek was what struck Mei as too immediately bizarre to be true. But sure enough, at her feet was not quite Xiao Mei, but a dirty orange tabby cat, prowling around her ankles only to stalk towards Alphonse and curl it’s tail between his foot and his crutch.

“Oh! We’re here!” Al glowed as he bent down with another _clank_ from his backpack to pet their new friend, who pressed into his palm with a purr.

“You two seem familiar,” said Mei, offering her hand to the orange cat as she knelt down as well; the cat took a sniff of her pointer finger and winced, quickly returning to Alphonse’s clearly trusted touch.

“Yeah, I think I’ve known this one the longest, but they all should know me pretty well by now.”

“They?”

Alphonse’s eyes flicked to look up at her for a quiver in time, and before Mei’s heart could completely stop, he simply smiled and said, “We’re here, just turn around!”

And so Mei rose to her feet to turn towards the creek, her jaw dropping at the sight. It was not a sunny knoll, not a glistening river she could see her reflection in, no romantic spot in the woods set to a Birdy song.

“Surprise!”

“It’s?” Mei blinked a few times to make sure she was seeing this all properly. “Cats?”

This was better, though.

There were at least a dozen besides the orange cat that liked Alphonse best—one that was sleek and black, one with fur like a tiger, one with a cropped tail like Xiao Mei, and one that seemed to prefer blending into the grey of the big stone pipe tunnel, for which the great, wide mouth opened into the running creek. Each and every cat all looked in Mei and Al's direction, but Mei suspected that they weren’t looking at her. Her suspicions were confirmed, when turning back towards Alphonse to relay her utter glee at the sight, he was kneeling on the ground, crutch laying in the dirt as he took small cans of cat food out of his dull blue backpack.

The source of the metal clanking. Ah. (Of course.) (Naturally.) (What else would it be?)

“I think this is where all the outdoor cats from all the neighbors come and congregate when they aren’t with their people,” said Alphonse; upon opening the first of the tin cans – tuna and chicken – a few of the cats rose from their lazing posts to brisk towards them. “Aquroya runs through our complex and through a few more subdivisions all the way up towards the University, so these guys could really be from all over Central.”

“So that’s why most of them are so friendly,” Mei observed, petting an old grey cat behind the ear that had begun purring at her feet, waiting for it’s turn at the meal. “And clean.”

“Well, _most_ of them,” Al’s voice strained as he held one of the cans above the head of the orange cat, who meowed at him angrily, claws out. He looked like some kind zookeeper for wild tigers, holding the food out of reach with his other hand out in goodwill, patiently waiting for the beast to come to him. “This one is definitely a stray. When my dad and I were here a few months ago, he was just a kitten, abandoned in the woods.”

“Oh no,” Mei frowned, lowering herself down to sit back on her legs like Al was. (That'd been how she found Xiao Mei, she remembered it clearly, even if it'd been years ago now.)

“And this one really, really didn’t like me at first, but he seemed to really trust the other cats, you know? And so I thought if I keep feeding them, they’ll trust me, and then _he’ll_ trust me enough, maybe, to let me take him to a vet, so he can get his shots…” Al trailed off, like he’d been reminding the cat a few inches from his finger tips of what it was they were doing here. It took a moment, maybe two, but the orange cat stopped his hissing and his clawing, and gingerly, stepped toward Alphonse to sniff the beds of his fingers. One step closer, and he’d let Alphonse scratch behind his ear.

“And if he gets his shots,” Mei continued the thought, with clarity, “he could have a real home, and a real family.”

“I knew you’d understand,” Al hummed, and Mei couldn’t help but smile to herself at that; the cat was rewarded dually for his good behavior, wasting no time after Al set the can of food before him to start scarfing it down. 

“Or I can adopt him,” whispered Al, mostly to himself. “Dad says he’s allergic to cats, but I think he’s lying.”

“I hope he’s lying, because it’d be nice for Xiao Mei to have another friend to send Snapchats too,” Mei joked.

“That’s true!” Al replied, his golden eyes glimmered with mischief. “Xiao Mei and Edward can help keep up our streak!”

Mei gasped, the corners of her mouth curling. “Did you really name him ‘Edward’?”

“Yes! Doesn’t he kind of remind you of my brother?” Edward II, almost on cue, hissed at the black cat that’d been stalking amongst the cans for any kind of leftovers for getting too close.

Mei made a show of drawing out her observation with thoughtful hum. “Too tall,” she replied, finally, and Alphonse snorted, his hand flying up to his mouth too late to stifle it.

“Mmmmm,” Mei’s hum changed keys, major to minor, “probably don’t put your hands near your mouth after petting the stray cat. I have hand sanitizer.” Al tossed his head back, laugh echoing loud and high through the leaves of the trees.

“You’re amazing, Mei,” Al said, gratefully taking the bottle from Mei when she offered and did not comment on her blush, if he’d noticed.

* * *

“No, no, no, you’re gonna waste paint if you go in long strokes like that.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry, Ed, here I was thinking _I_ was the one who’d done this before.”

Saturday was for the hooligans, or at least for Ed and his friends to get dragged outside by Ling, to watch him perfect his tags and test his newly-made stencils on the tunnel down by the creek. It was overcast, the sky a bitter slate beyond the curtain of orange and red and yellow trees above them, but given it was only about one in the afternoon, could still be considered “broad daylight”. Which, obviously, was prime time for some grafitti practice.

Ed swiped the spray can from Ling and rolled it in his hands, examining the small details written on the cannister of Red Pepper Red. “See?” he held the paint can back up, close to Ling’s face. “Paint’s made with gas propellant, dummy. You’re gonna waste paint if you go in those long ass strokes the whole time instead of small bursts.”

“It’s just ‘cause he’s rich and he can replace them real fast,” Paninya popped her gum, posture lazy and lax with her hands hidden in the pockets of her denim overalls.

“It’s because when your art is _doomed_ to be unappreciated in this world,” Ling turned to them, annunciating every his word with great gravitas and a greater grin as he gave Red Pepper Red another shake, “time is of the essence, legacies last as long as you let them, there are detractors everywhere.”

“If a rich person wastes their money and no one is around to see it, did it still happen?”

“Gee, I don’t know, why don’t you turn around and we can find out?”

Ed gave a glance toward Lan Fan, who’d been keeping watch at the mouth of the tunnel. He hadn’t asked her to play look-out, no one had asked her to, but she flashed him a thumbs up with her good hand before she shoved it back into her hoodie’s front pocket, carefully scanning the woods beyond the cement and the creek, right and left, left and right.

“Anything exciting out there, Lan Fan?” Ling asked, distractedly, not once pulling his eyes from the cement canvas on which he worked.

“Just a bunch of cats?” Lan Fan replied, like even she didn’t believe what she was seeing.

It was honorable of her to look after them in this way, if almost completely unnecessary, middle of the day or not. This part of the Aquroya was fairly removed from where most hikers tended to tred, a weird dip in some old woods by some old tunnel that was absolutely polluting the creek, if anyone cared to ask. Hohenheim, the bastard, had found it when he’d taken Al for a walk, who’d in turn shown Ed, in an attempt to show him that sometimes hanging out with Hohenheim, being in Central, could be fun.

It was fun, but it wasn’t Resembool.

“So, enough allowance to pay for new spray cans every week, but not enough allowance to pay for bail, got it,” Paninya scathed; when Ed turned back toward the depths of the tunnel, Ling was nearly finished adding yet another design to a stone wall full of art-in-progress and Paninya was just as apathetic, facing the other side of the tunnel out of spite.

“He’d have to get caught,” Ed admitted with a cynical laugh, waving vaguely towards the mouth of the tunnel toward the light that still shone through the trees, through the overcast sky. “And it’s not like anyone comes down here anyway, except us.”

With the flick of a wrist, Ling was finished with his stencil, backing up to check out his handiwork and beaming. Signing off with a crowned “Y.P.”, for “Yung Prince”, the piece was done: a Dao sword, slicing through an apple, a banana, a pear, and a …?

“What’s that last one?” Paninya asked, pointing to the fourth item being sliced, the red of her nail polish matching the red of the spray paint.

“It’s a brain,” Ling frowned at her. “It’s _obviously_ a brain, what else could it be?”

“Instant ramen before you add water,” said Paninya.

“Uncooked beef,” said Ed.

“A really big walnut,” said Lan Fan, who’s voice made them jump, as no one had heard her coming down the tunnel at all.

The corners of Ling’s nostrils turned up, as he took to analyzing the stencil in his paint-stained hands, comparing it back up to his masterpiece, back down at the stencil. “I think I’m ready to go home now.”

“Aww,” Paninya cooed, hooking an arm around his neck. “Don’t take our critiques too hard there, Fruit Ninja.”

“ _Stop,”_ Ling groaned, but still, the group departed with arms wrapped around shoulders, limb to limb to metal limb.

* * *

Sunday was for long walks with Den, earbuds in and music up loud.

Den didn’t really need the prosthetic leg, but she seemed to move more comfortably with it, more like her old self, and so Winry continued to tinker. Granny said she was getting good at this, deeply proud somewhere inbetween her morbid delight at the chance for Winry to practice custom leg fittings on her own, now three-legged dog, but Winry was fine with that. Not a lot of car shops could build custom limbs for amputees, not a lot of teenage girls could work on cars, let alone legs; much like Den, she took the support where she could get it.

A few weeks out from the hit and run now, Den had a slow range of movement that seemed to grow smoother with every walk. Ever the scientist, Winry knew the next thing to do would be to test the limb across terrains; once they’d conquered a walk on the pavement, around their flat complex of duplexes, Winry and Den moved on to grass, then one small hill, then a few hills, and now, through the forest floor after a night of light rain. Their adventures had been interesting data collection, if not a relief for Den, who pouted through her entire recovery process, and a relief for Winry, who still felt pangs of terror at the thought of her dog being hit by that stupid, wretched driver.

Talk about things Winry would’ve liked to take a wrench to. 

Coming up on the old stone tunnel the Elrics had shown her a few weeks back, she figured this was as good a place to stop for a breather as any other. She flipped the switch on Den’s adjustable leash to give the old girl more space to run around and bark at the cats that liked to sit along the fallen trees or up on the stone brick, or at least the ones that hadn’t immediately run for cover when they’d seen Winry and her dog coming.

Den suddenly caught a whiff of something interesting; Winry skipped through a few songs on her playlist as her dog sniffed her leash in a wrap around her legs.

She almost didn’t notice, through the familiar synth beat of an old favorite tune, but whatever Den had smelled must of have been especially worthwhile, the mutt suddenly pulling harder.

_Sniff, sniff, sniff._

Den’s nose twitched erratically and her back straightened all the way down to the tip of her tail, like it did when she smelled something delicious, like a chipmunk or baby bunnies or garbage. But there were no more cats in sight, nothing scurrying across the undergrowth. Her metal leg held up well as she stomped though, quick and heavy, with a loud smack every time she picked it up from the mud, with no clear, straight path to follow and no care for the owner she dragged along in her search.

“Woah, Den! What is it?” Winry called, her voice lost in the distance Den managed to create in her frantic search. “Anything excit-“

Just then, Den’s stalking gave to a hard tug on her already taut leash, and Winry tripped over her boots, forced to keep up lest she wanted them to get separated.

If anything was good about being strung along by her dog, it was good to find out that at least Den’s strength hadn’t faltered too much since the accident.

It didn’t take long, after some running and stumbling and running some more, for the tugging to stop. It took even less time after that for Winry to jog the length of the retractable leash and see Den, digging with all her strength and her prosthetic front paw, trying to get at something interesting just under the surface of the ground between two stark thin trees.

In hindsight, maybe Winry should have maybe considered a few of the obvious red flags waving in her face in regards of what was to come. Where she’d found herself giddy, watching the metal limb she’d hand built withstand Den’s headstrong digging, there were signals, perhaps, from the universe or beyond, that maybe they should turn around and go home. The clouds in the sky completely blocked the sun from sight, shading the earth like a black curtain being drawn closed. The air was colder, the wind harsher. The two trees that flanked Winry and Den on either side were the only ones so pale in color, so bare without leaves, clearly dead.

A tug and a grunt. Winry pulled her earbuds out and tried to get a glimpse over Den’s shoulder, watching her dog continue to sniff, sniff, sniff, frantic and excited, before taking something in her jowels and pulling it from the ground with her teeth.

“Hey, what _did_ you find?” Winry asked again as she knelt to get a closer look, her words falling on unwilling or uncomprehending ears, before she finally caught a glimpse.

A chest. Den had led her to a chest.

Or rather, more of a firebox? It was about twice as long as it was tall, Winry noted as she pulled it into her lap, and it was heavy (good work Den!). The four-number combination lock on the top had been broken, as though something bigger and heavier had fallen and dented the metal, the whole box caked in dirt and clay. It looked like a safe, security box, more than anything, like the one her Granny kept important documents in, fireproof and waterproof and sealed with a lock. Winry gingerly opened the broken lid to peer inside; it looked like maybe it’d been buried with the top latch open, as it was filled with, surprise, even more dirt, a few worms wriggling through the earth. Unusual, sure, but not wildly abnormal, as it was somewhat common to stumble upon abandoned items in the woods more exciting than the standard pop can and condom wrapper.

But Winry, ever the scientist, liked to look close.

Three things struck her immediately as being strange, as she begun to turn the heavy chest over in her hands.

First, poking out through the dirt packed into the chest like sand to a plastic castle mold, was a clear, plastic triangle. Upon giving it a tug, she found more plastic, but no release. The obvious course of action was also the easiest; the mud didn’t slide out when she held it upside down at first, but gravity was bound to work its magic eventually, and with a few shakes, the dense earth fell and crumbled on the forest floor. And with it, fell a plastic ziplock bag, about a gallon-sized, filled with folded pieces of printer paper, and strangely, a USB drive, shattered at the handle.

Second, upon the contents of the chest falling to the ground, Den stuck her excited nose right into the base of the open safe, her tail wagging excitedly. It was more than if she'd smelled something good or edible or whatever; it was like she smelled something familiar, how she'd greet Winry after staying the night at Paninya's, or Granny after a conference trip. But upon checking inside again, Winry didn't see much at all, just more of the same black metal, more particles of dirt that had hung on. 

Third, and perhaps the strangest of all, was the detail she wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't set the chest down in the specific way she had after shaking it free of it's contents; on the bottom of the chest was painted a dark red “3”, big and bold and unmistakable.


	2. old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me, last week: i'll have the rest of the fic out by the end of the weekend!  
> me, now: uhhhhh i mean next weekend???
> 
> reading responses to this fic and the other sister fics in this AU has really been touching, thanks for taking time to like or comment on my lil fics :')
> 
> if you're just interested in this as a standalone, then the only two things that would be important to your understanding that are discussed more in other chapters are 1) Ed skipped a few grades and at 15 is doing dual-enrollment at Central State University, where Roy is his senior student mentor, intended to keep him on track for the program and 2) Central State University was previously Central Military Academy, but about two years prior, had been bought out by the state school system after a serious federal investigation removed most of the senior members of the administration bc they'd been caught stealing money from student scholarships/research grants - all of this, and more, is discussed in detail in the rest of the AU!

[rocknbell, snap] (a photo of Den, tongue lolled out, sitting beside a dirty metal chest in the kitchen of the Rockbell home)  
[rocknbell, chat] Den found some buried treasure today

[fullmetal, chat] wow best girl

[alelric, chat] best girl!! She looks so proud!!

[fullmetal, chat] that’s awfully good work on a busted leg too  
[fullmetal, chat] but even her leg isn’t as busted as that safe, jeez

[rocknbell, chat] I know!!! She even dug a little to get to it!  
[rocknbell, chat] but it gets weirder  
[rocknbell, snap] (a photo of the chest, zoomed in on the painted red “3”)

[alelric, chat] :0

[fullmetal, chat] whaaaaaaat  
[fullmetal, chat] winry who’s scavenger hunt did you fuck with?

[rocknbell, chat] wow that’s your first thought?

[alelric, chat] well, a buried chest marked with the number “3” does imply the existence of a “1” and a “2”, doesn’t it?  
[alelric, chat] but what’s sticking out of the side??

The same rogue corner of the ziplock bag just didn’t want to sit right in the chest, apparently. Picking the whole bag up by the clear, plastic corner, with her thumb and pointer finger, Winry was half-focused on the dirt powdering the trail left by the movement, half-focused on acting as a shield before Den could sneak past her and stick her nose inside the safe again. It took some finesse to get a clear photo and block Den at the same time, but Winry got the shot of the dirty bag to send back to the boys, captioned [treasure?]

In the time it took for her to get up from the kitchen tile to wipe off her hands, grab a wet paper towel for the mess she was making on the floor, refill Den’s water dish—there was a knock at the front door. Or rather, two synchronous knocks, the sound of Den’s paws clattering across the tile towards the door with a _boof,_ only for the knocking to pick up, over and over and over, almost with the intention of being annoying. Huh. Winry rolled her eyes, plodding to the front entryway and methodically leaning over Den’s thrilled, wagging tale for the deadbolt and the doorknob. It wasn’t like Hohenheim and Granny hadn’t made keys for one another, it wasn’t like they couldn’t just let themselves in –

The Elrics were Winry’s oldest and most cherished friends, and boy, did they know it.

“We made a few observations,” started Edward, still breathy from whatever scramble they made to get to her doorstep, next door to their own, in a minute and a half flat. Den pounced on him first, her two front paws colliding with the black denim on Ed’s thighs to rear up on her hindlegs; Ed stumbled, but caught her with a scratch behind the ear.

“And we thought it’d be more efficient to come check them out in person,” Alphonse finished with a gulp; two sets of golden eyes eagerly anticipating her signal to come inside and you think one of them would have the consideration to start with a ‘hi Winry’, ‘how have you been, Winry?’, ‘how about that rain, Winry?’

Winry sighed. “Didn’t take long. What, were you texting me in the group chat while sitting next to each other?”

“Alphonse was working downstairs, I was working upstairs.” The _duh_ went unspoken.

“You know, even though we’re neighbors, it’d still be polite to warn me when you’re coming over,” she complained to absolutely no avail, stepping out of the way for Den to bound back inside, leading the way for Al and Ed to stomp their feet on the doormat and discard their shoes at the door as fast as they possibly could.

“Sorry,” said Al, struggling with the last knot on his sneakers, Den’s help not making the task any easier as she took one lace in her mouth and begun to tug.

“We did call for an _appointment_ , almost immediately,” Ed retorted, tossing one of his boots so haphazardly that it hit the wall behind him. Den released another _boof_ at the crash. “Not our fault if you don’t check your phone.”

Winry blinked, noting the emptiness of her pockets, and how she’d almost certainly last seen her phone on the kitchen counter. “So I have to be married to my phone, then?”

“No, not if you take walk-ins,” Ed ignored Winry’s glare with a wry grin as he tossed his coat over the back of her couch (Granny’s least favorite habit of his, and she hated all of his habits) and gave Den another scratch under her chin, before he pointed to the kitchen. “Everything where you left it in your last snap?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Winry replied, deftly catching Al’s crutch before Den’s wagging tail could knock it from where it leaned against the wall and clatter onto the floor.

An upside to Ed and Al was that they both thought like scientists as well, paced and thoughtful and considerate of all sides before making any inferences. When Winry, Al, and Den finally caught up with Ed’s hurricane path, he was on his stomach on the kitchen floor, using a fork to flip open the top of the metal chest, like touching it might only tamper with the evidence, like going too fast might upset it somehow. Al gave a chuckle at the sight and took a seat in one of the old wooden chairs that rounded the dining room table, bending at the waist for a bird’s eye view of the chest. Before Den could stick her twitching and interested nose back into the box, Winry took hold of the collar around her neck and waited.

“Did you open the bag?” Ed asked Winry, strained from lying on his stomach.

She shook her head, blonde hair whipping at her waist. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t know if it was something important, like something I shouldn’t see.”

“So you thought the safe might hold something important, didn’t look at what was inside, but still took it home?” Ed asked without sounding like he was asking, flat and sarcastic. Winry, from where she stood, gave him a light kick right on the side of his stomach with a huff; he recoiled with a shrill “ _hey_ ”.

“I took it home,” now it was Winry’s turn to ignore his glares, “because I thought maybe I’d go turn it in down at the police station. Who knows? Maybe this chest was important to someone and they lost it in some kind of accident?”

Al hummed, resting his chin in one hand, the other hand leisurely petting the top of Den’s head, between her ears. “Remind us where you found this again, Winry?”

“Down by that old tunnel, where Hohenheim showed you, and then you showed me, remember? With all the cats.”

Al’s head tilted, his nose crinkled. “Really?”

“You seem surprised,” Ed observed.

“That seems a little far off the beaten path for a chest to just appear on accident,” Al noted, in a tone that betrayed his doubt.

“Plus,” Ed pipped up, indicating spots on the inside of the chest with the fork he’d acquired, “it’s just like we thought: this thing is busted, like, _really_ dented, and looks like it was packed with dirt.”

“Well, it was,” said Winry. “Really dense too, like I had to shake it to get all of the sludge to come out.”

Ed looked to Al, Al looked to Ed. Den filled the break through her loud, happy panting.

“Makes me think someone buried it and forgot about it long enough for the elements to get at it,” said Al, externalizing what he’d been mulling over. “Maybe a tree fell on it, and the shift of earth around the creek as the seasons changed got it all filled with dirt?”

Ed seemed to consider the option before he shook his head, in the end. “It’d probably take a lot of concentrated force to bust a metal safe like this. I think the dent came first, and then the owner decided to bury the whole safe.”

Winry frowned. “But why?”

“I don’t know.”

A beat of silence passed between the trio, the mouth to the safe a wide open black mass parallel to the white of the tiled floor. If only for a second, it looked like maybe it could find the consciousness to explain itself, answer some questions, talk back.

“Which is why we should open the _bag_ to see what’s _inside_ ,” Ed smarmed, pointing his fork to the ziplock bag, still and dusty on the floor. Winry kicked him again.

Ed’s gold braid flipped over his shoulder when he turned on his side to fume up at her. “Stop kicking me!”

Winry sneered, placing her free hand on her popped hip. “Stop being stupid!”

“Brother, how much have you learned in your college chemistry class about balancing equations?” asked Al.

“A whole lot, actually. Way more than in high school chem. Why do you ask?”

Alphonse had opened the bag.

Despite the inside of the metal safe being completely packed with earth, the ziploc bag had been closed and locked tight enough that it’s contents remained clean and untampered with. Al had pulled the broken USB Winry noticed earlier out slowly and in three parts, the green motherboard splintered at the middle. In his hands were the papers that’d been folded in half and packed inside: in his right, was a letter of sorts with the old Central Military Academy letterhead printed at the top, in his left, the paper he dangled in front of his brother’s face, was a page of scribbles, letters and numbers and arrows and –

“Chemistry notes?” Ed shifted the weight on his elbows, grabbing the notes between the stiff, leathery fingers of his braced right hand to bring up to his nose. The corner of the worn papers were stapled, and almost every inch of the white pages were coated, head to toe, in writing. “These were in that safe?”

“Along with this,” Alphonse took another look at the remaining piece of paper in his hand, before he held it up for both Ed and Winry to see. “It looks like someone’s research funding.”

“Someone’s _mad old_ research funding,” said Ed, pointing to the tiny printed, month, day, and year, typed just below the ornate dragon insignia. “Look at the date. Central hasn’t been a military academy in years.”

The form, titled ‘GRADUATE GRANT AWARD NOTIFICATION’, had been dated for an August four years prior, with some bare-bones information typed up in a box-by-box format. It seemed like the kind of thing a responsible researcher would want to keep a hold of, as there were bolded sections for the recipient name, project title and staff, for the budget and project periods, the chart string to access the award, and of course, the award itself.

Ed gawked suddenly, his eyebrows flying into his bangs. “Check out the funds for this study though! That’s a lot of cash for one research project. Way to go,” Ed’s eyes traced the paper, his finger searching for the name, “Heathcliff Erbe.”

“I mean, I guess this makes more sense than someone just losing a whole safe in the woods,” said Winry. “Heathcliff got accepted to graduate school to study…” she took the corner of the paper to brisk through it’s comments again, “‘ _Reluctance to Engage in Clinical Counseling in The Clinician-Client Dyad’,_ and then kept all of his most important documents in a safe?”

“You mean he kept his grant award information, a busted USB drive, and a page of _nonsense_ in a safe, intentionally labeled with a giant ‘3’ on the bottom? And for what?” Ed said, tossing the page of chem notes on the ground in front of him, running a hand through his hair in frustration.

“Tell us how you really feel, Brother,” Al deadpanned.

“Getting anywhere with these equations is going to be harder than I anticipated,” Ed confessed.

“As in?”

“I have no idea what any of this means.”

“Excellent.”

“I mean, look,” Ed pointed to the first of what looked like five elaborate and difficult chemical equations, though it was hard to tell between intermittent spouts of messy writing. “This either isn’t balanced or there’s clearly some specific sort of reaction being represented by this one arrow. It’s missing too many molecules, but the reaction’s not labeled and I don’t know what it could be. Hydrolysis, maybe?”

High school chemistry was demanding most of Winry’s study time this school year even with Ed’s help, and she dreaded to check her grade online after a quiz, so she resigned herself to reading what she could of the smudged script in between the equations. Lowering herself to sit on her legs and get a closer look over Ed’s shoulder, it took a few efforts at seriously deciphering the scribbling before she realized—it was just _scribbling_. Worse than Granny’s doctor’s handwriting, and almost intentionally so, there were sections of the paper where the ink was denser than others, like there’d been writing over scribbling, or scribbling over writing. The only phrase legible enough sat at the bottom right hand corner of the page, innocuous enough that Winry could have easily passed over it.

_Philosopher’s Stone._

_S_ he’d been leaning too far to her right. Winry recoiled upon impact—her cheek had hit Ed’s shoulder, and her spine jolted her into a straight line like her nerves had been struck by a small electric current. Den, ever the shrew, took her moment of weakness to dip from Winry’s grasp and stick her nose straight into the safe, just as fervently as she had in the woods, sniffing loud and constant. At the sight, Winry watched as Ed’s expression went totally blank, his mouth opening and staying open for a moment or two before he found the words he was looking for.

“What’s the dog version of cat nip?” he asked just to Winry, almost whispering and rather mild.

“Anise,” Winry replied, just as quiet.

“I don’t smell licorice,” said Ed, sliding on his stomach to get his nose closer to the safe before he caught a whiff and stuck his tongue out. “Yeah—this thing just smells like dirt.”

A smile pulled across Winry’s face before she could help it, before she started to explain: “She’s been doing that since we found it. It’s more than a little concerning at this point.”

“Weird.”

“I googled our friend, Heathcliff,” Alphonse announced from his seat above them, eyes illuminated by his phone screen as he scrolled through something of interest or import with his thumb.

“Good thinking, Al!” Ed pushed himself up from the floor to sit, real leg tucked in, prosthetic leg stretched out. “Did you find a Facebook? An Instagram? Maybe a LinkedIn?”

“No, but I will say,” Al looked something regretful as he held his phone out for them to see, “I’ve never been friends with a felon before.”

_“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.”_

In all the way Heathcliff’s notes weren’t, the big bold headline was crystal clear: MILITARY ACADEMY STUDENT INDICTED FOR MANUFACTURING DRUGS IN COLLEGE APARTMENT. Second Lieutenant Heathcliff Erbe was named in the second line of the first paragraph of the article that detailed his humanity through small facts stated plainly, but in a specific way that his grant award notification never could. In the documents they’d found, Heathcliff was nothing more than a name on a page; the article detailed his connection to the school, his intended course of study, and worst of all, had a photograph, showing a young man with tan skin and nearly-white hair in the daily military uniform being escorted by police out of an academic building at what was now Central State University.

And he looked terrified.

Winry didn’t expect either Ed nor Al to notice the very real, very stark Rubicon they were teetering on, tipping their toes in, maybe going just a smidge too far.

“This was March of the same school year on the award notice,” said Al, taking his phone back to scroll through to the end of the article, quickly scanning the screen one last time. “The article doesn’t go on to mention anything about a box like we found, just the allegations against Heathcliff, a comment from the Dean, that kind of thing.”

Ed folded his arms, steam just about pouring out his ears as some machine behind his eyes attempted to create some sense out of everything they’d found. “I feel like seeing that article should’ve cleared something up, but I only have more questions, on top of the questions I already had,” he said, reaching his good hand out to stroke Den along her back, her nose still buried in the metal.

“Right, like why does this safe exist in the first place? How did it get out in the woods? Does Heathcliff know about it, let alone own it?” As he spoke, Winry watched Al’s thumbs tap at the speed of sound as though he was—and her stomach turned—taking notes.

“What’s on the busted USB? Why don’t these chemical equations make sense? What did a psych student need such complicated chem notes for?” Ed continued the brainstorm; Al’s fingers didn’t lose speed, his tongue sticking out in concentration.

Winry couldn’t help but notice they were considering this awfully seriously.

“What’s up with the big red ‘3’ on the safe?” Al offered—offered, as opposed to asked.

“Why won’t Den stop sniffing the safe long enough to pay attention to me?” That one wasn’t serious, unless it was—Ed closed the top of the case in a swift movement, though still careful not to hit the top of Den’s snout. Den whined at the sudden flurry of movement, her tail still wagging as Ed heaved the case over her head to Al, who set it on the table with great effort beside the broken USB.

“You know if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you two were thinking about actually investigating into this more,” Winry joked, because if she told a joke, the next reasonable thing to do would be for the boys to laugh right? ‘No, Winry!’ or a ‘Of course not, Winry!” or perhaps a more self-reflective ‘We’re not detectives, just curious scientific minds, Winry!’

Instead, the Elrics remained very, very quiet and kept their bodies very, very still.

“ _Noooo_ , you _guys_!”

“Come on, Winry, aren’t you curious about what this thing’s all about?” Ed nudged her with his elbow, the feeling of dread or reality or whatever certainly not hitting him yet, or at least not enough to overtake the thrill of a puzzle.

Granted, Winry also liked a puzzle.

She folded her arms with a huff. “A _little_ ,” Winry admitted. “But I also had a plan, you know, to take care of someone else’s belongings responsibly, not make them into a Scooby-Doo episode because you two like to stick your noses where they don’t belong.”

Al nodded at that, and Winry felt a twinge seen. “I mean, I can see two real courses of action here, personally,” he said to her (if anyone asked, Al was her favorite brother). “We can either throw our hands up and turn it in to local authorities and hope it gets returned to whoever it’s supposed to go to…”

“Or?” Ed asked.

“We can go on a walk to see if we can find the illustrious Safe 1 and Safe 2,” Al said so sincerely, with such a sweet smile, that Winry had to roll her eyes (she took it back, both brothers were demons). “If we found one metal case in those backwoods, who’s to say we won’t find any others?”

“We should round up a team,” said Ed, leaning into Winry again with a big, cheesy grin. “You’re coming with us, right?”

“Right, Winry?” Al echoed, batting his eyelashes.

Den, at that moment, got into Winry’s face where she knelt, and gave her face a great big lick, also in the mood for adventure, apparently.

 _I got a bad feeling about this, Scoob,_ Winry thought, turning to look toward the two eager boys flanking her at either side. “Text the group chat,” she conceded.

* * *

Leave it to Ed and Al to go to _one_ physical therapy session and come back with two more friends who also wanted their prostheses worked on.

But Winry would be lying to herself if she hadn’t felt her heart flutter and take flight when, say, Paninya, in all her sarcastic humor and cool, lax attitude, had put on Winry’s adjusted legs, the metal glittering in the height of the July sun, and said “oh my _god_ , I didn’t know these things could ever be this comfortable.” And nothing made the empty summer afternoons slip into empty summer nights with ease like her wrenches and her scrap metal and her sudden circle of new friends. The summer before last was their first in Central, and as Winry remembered it, was a little like laying down and falling asleep in the tall grass behind Granny’s old house in Resembool. It was both comforting and methodical, the way she could keep her blonde head of hair cloaked in the yellow stalks, hidden from the nameless, faceless threats that always seemed to lurk just around the corner to stalk the people she cared about most.

But if she held on tight, stayed still, and kept working…

When she brought Lan Fan’s updated arm back outside into the light of day, the sky just barely twanged orange, Winry noticed that the gang had clearly been knee-and-elbow deep in some intense chalk artistry. The whole one-car driveway leading up to Hohenheim’s garage was just about filled, leaving little room for Winry to ballet and marimba and otherwise tip-toe her way past beautifully shaded popsicles and ferns and less adeptly drawn games of hangman (“LING EATS BOOGERS”), tic-tac-toe and big nondescript circular doodling, each combination of lines and circles a bit different from the one beside it.

“Lan Fan!” Winry called to the circle of laughing faces sitting at the edge of the green lawn; one pitch black head of hair in particular spun to greet her. “Your arm is ready!”

Not much of a talker, Lan Fan instead offered a tentative smile, the one that got warmer every time they hung out, and a wave with the hand that didn’t disappear under her oversized t-shirt sleeve. Al and Ed had filled her in on this same front lawn earlier in the summer that she was the most recent addition to the teen’s PT group run downtown at Central Hospital that they’d met Paninya at, and had undergone a loss traumatizing enough that the mention made Ling’s ever-goofy grin completely disappear. It didn’t get easier, hearing all the ways her friends suffered, but it did make Winry want to try harder for the perfect fit, the smoothest grip, the ideal prosthesis.

At the sound of Winry’s hollering, however, Den had dropped the tug-of-war game she had going with Alexander, the neighbor dog, to sprint in her owner’s direction, tongue waving in the wind. Alexander, the big white mass of fur he was, bellowed after Den, making it now, not one, but two dogs charging Winry at full speed with her preciously and meticulously constructed metal arm in tow.

Her friends created a chorus that could sing one note: “ _noooooooooo_ ”. Winry was sure her life flashed before her eyes. Most of it had been anxiety about missing screws.

Before they could collide with her however, two little brown braids and a lopsided daisy crown seemed to intercept the path of the two dogs with a high “ _Alexander, Den, wait!_ ”

Nina Tucker lived just around the block and was really only about as tall as her burly dog, but had near absolute command of his attention. At her beck and call, Alexander stopped and waited, calmly, and licked her face when she and her little legs caught up to him. Den, already at full speed, took a lap around Winry, Lan Fan’s arm held high above her head, before turning a heel to run back at Nina’s command.

Winry let out a sigh of relief, clutching the arm close to her chest. “Thanks Nina!”

“Of course!” Nina giggled, two dogs licking her face as she adjusted her flower headband. “Anything for you, Miss Winry!”

At the time, Winry had grinned back at Nina as she continued to lovingly stroke the dogs that seemed to strive to protect her, but it had been wistful as well; Nina was set to move in with her mom a few towns south, and was bound to take Alexander with her. After spending the last few months hanging out with her so she didn’t have to play outside alone—not just Winry and the Elrics, but Paninya and Ling, who didn’t live in the neighborhood—it was weird to think there’d be a point where she wasn’t part of the group, running across the lawn because she saw any of the friends sitting in this circle by the mailbox hanging out on the front yard.

Things would be quiet without Nina, Winry thought.

She wouldn’t dwell, however, taking a deep breath before carefully, consciously, _slowly_ , sitting down beside Lan Fan at the edge of the circle to show her her new prosthesis. With all of the enthusiasm she’d had working on it (which was admittedly, quite a lot), Winry took to explaining the mechanics with glee. A few weeks ago, Lan Fan’s face might’ve clouded over in distaste, but she nodded attentively as Winry spoke now, watching carefully the screws and parts she pointed out. “And keep in mind the frame is still made up of your old arm, so all the rules your doctor gave you before still apply, especially when you’re adjusting. Your prosthetic sock will still fit in the mold, don’t forget to clean it out every day, work up to wearing it two hours, tops—”

Paninya, seated across the circle, clicked her tongue at that one. “Two hours, you say?”

“Since when are we only supposed to wear our limbs for two hours a day?” asked Ed, looking down at his own leg.

“Since always, Edward. That’s the rule?” Winry spoke slow, her eyes narrowing at Ed, who seemed to look just about anywhere that wasn’t at her. Utterly sheepish, Ed and Paninya matched their pained grimace as they turned to look at one another, communicating silently with a swift, understanding nod.

“Interesting,” Ed said, a bit shrill. Winry punched his arm.

“This is why you need to bring your leg in for repairs more than literally everyone else,” she bit, as his mouth contorted into an “O” shape, his right hand flying to hold the arm she’d hit.

“I knew the limit was only two hours a day, I listen to you when you talk, Winry,” Al said, smile cheesy, his two braced legs splayed behind him as he lay on his stomach and constructed his own flower crown like Nina’s.

“Thank you, Alphonse,” Winry muttered to him with a mock-seriousness, trying to laugh with him instead of put any kind of pressure on the pair of friends to her left, who seemed to analyze the arm like it was something foreign and strange.

“So,” Ling spoke only to Lan Fan, quiet, coaxing—Winry thought back to the way talking about Lan Fan’s injury had aged his jack-o-lantern face some ten years, and his clear and genuine investment in her relief, should she ever find it. “Are you going to try it on, or not?”

Lan Fan bobbed her head to affirm, slow at first before becoming confident. Much like the summer, she rolled up her large, black t-shirt sleeve with one hand and began to slide her residual arm through the straps and into the hold, as though moving too quickly might trigger an alarm.

“Well, jeez everyone, we don’t need to watch like we’re at the circus or something,” Ling quipped, waving his hands like they were mice he was shooing away. Ed and Paninya turned at the hip, resting elbows to knees, faces to hands, as they looked away from the group and towards the span of identical lawns that rolled out behind them. Alphonse stopped the construction of his crown long enough to cover his eyes. Winry turned her attention to instead watch Nina as she trotted back towards the mailbox where they sat in a circle.

But Nina, on the other hand, did not turn away, and watched with wide curious eyes as Lan Fan begun to adjust the strap around her shoulders, the buckle across her chest. Something important was happening, Winry observed, as she followed the line of Nina’s ogling to the way the tension in Lan Fan’s forehead began to unfurl and peel and float away. In fact, the more satisfied Lan Fan started to look, the more clarity Nina seemed to receive, until she stuck out her foot towards Winry, her little white shoe with the daisy clasp high in the air and asked, “me next?”

Winry snorted before a guffaw could bubble up from her stomach and echo between the duplexes that lined the complex; her friends’ shoulders shook as they too tried to stifle their laughter, everyone from Lan Fan to Paninya to Edward laughing just as hard. “Sorry Nina,” Winry replied, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye, “that’s just not how it works.”

Nina scrunched her face up before giggling to herself. “That’s what I thought you’d say,” she said, watching her shoe as she put her leg down. Quiet for a moment, she caught a glimpse of the doll leaned up at the mailbox post, sitting up like she was part of the group. “Can we do one for Samantha then?”

It was one of those dolls that ran tall with very human-like features—long, brushable brown hair and a pretty gingham sundress, bendable digits and limbs, a few of those real-looking fingers stained blue from a Crayola marker, no doubt. Winry was never particularly fond of dolls when she was younger, but when Nina requested, she gingerly took Samantha by the waist and held her leg out, tutting and humming like she was examining a patient. “You know, I’ve got just the thing.”

When she brought Samantha’s supplies outside into the light of day, this time the sky had moved to a deep orange, blending into pinks and purples overhead, the sun disappearing behind the trees. The gang was still seated in the circle she’d left them in, save Nina perched in front of Edward as he fixed her long left braid for her. Alphonse tossed Winry the daisy crown he’d been working on when she sat down, Paninya throwing her head back at the same time—Winry presumed the joke came across the circle from Ling, as it usually did, but color her surprised to hear Lan Fan giggle, _really_ giggle, in the middle of her animated, now two-handed, storytelling.

Central would never be Resembool, and that was a fact that hurt, still. But in exchange for reading in the tall yellow grass and living in the house she’d grown up in with her parents, she got flower crowns and new and exciting projects. Winry got to see the Elrics finding their lives again after the house fire, got to see others exchanging the things that’d hurt them for something else that could work, with time. Granny had told her when she could hardly see through the tears out the window of the moving van that even if there was no turning back, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t like what she found moving forward.

Heart full, Winry got to work fixing a leg for Samantha with her tools, or rather, tin foil and a Philips screwdriver just for show.

“Good thinking, Winry,” Ed said, admiring her handiwork as she wrapped the last bit of foil around Samantha’s ankle. Winry beamed, pretending though as if she was too focused to reply, kept still, kept working.

* * *

The sky had taken to drizzling again, like it was wringing out a towel real quick overhead, sometime in between the Elrics analyzing the contents of the metal chest and the rest of their friends agreeing to meet up and join the hunt. It was an easy overcast now, but the threat of another shower loomed and the paths along the forest floor would undoubtedly be slippery.

“Question,” Ling raised his hand like he was an inquisitive student in a classroom, and not like he was wearing a shit-eating grin and an old poncho from Niagara Falls at the mouth of the Aquroya’s visitor trail, “can someone explain to me what we’re doing here again?”

“Den found buried treasure, we’re gonna go look around in the woods and see if we find any other chests like it that are numbered with red paint,” Winry said, for what seemed like the thousandth time, armed with Den by the leash in one hand and a small shovel in the other. That reply seemed like enough for Ling, who gave a nod and shoved his hands in his pockets.

He rose one hand again.

“Yes, Ling.”

“Another question,” Ling said, and all of their friends turned their attention on him like he was preparing to give an announcement, clearing his throat for dramatics, “anyone else feel a little silly?”

“It’s not silly!” Mei admonished him.

“It’s a little silly,” Al admitted, standing just beside her, “but it’s not like we have anything else to do. Other than homework.”

“Barf,” said Paninya.

A dubious request or not, it wasn’t as though all of their friends hadn’t come through whole heartedly. Ling had his rain boots on, and a flashlight on hand Mei brought her first aid kit and an extra, bright pink, umbrella. Paninya had her old hooded windbreaker out on loan to Lan Fan so her hoodie wouldn’t get soaked. Even if they weren’t here for the thrill of discovery, for the chemical reactions or Heathcliff’s research, it was nice to know they were here for Winry and the boys—friends support friends even on their silliest treasure hunts, so it would seem.

“Nice metal detector, Fullmetal,” Lan Fan nudged Ed beside her with half a smirk, half a smile.

Ed snorted as he adjusted the battery pack. “Hohenheim keeps so much shit in that basement, something was bound to be useful eventually.” With the flip of a switch, the metal detector whirred and buzzed, warming up to a steady _beep, beep, beep._ “I’m not sure about the stats on this thing, but who knows? Maybe it’ll pick up something cool!”

“Wow,” Paninya tapped her chin in consideration, her round face pulling tight a wide grin, “you just sounded so excited, I hope for your sake we find something more than like, a beer bottle cap.”

Leading the way, Ed stuck his tongue out at Paninya as he walked past her, the rest of the group following his footsteps, not far behind.

The first leg of their journey into the woods was as uneventful as most of their hangouts were, so as to say, chaotic if not entertaining. Mei Chang had been a girl scout before she moved and knew a lot about the leaves falling from the different types of trees overhead, the animal tracks and growing plants below (“That one’s pretty!” “Great, it’s also poisonous”). Ed’s pockets were filling up with the bottle caps he was finding at Winry’s request; she thought maybe she could melt them down to use as scrap, the opportunity was there. Ling brought snacks and seemed prepared to eat most of them, Lan Fan, prepared to join him, brought the bag to stick the wrappers in (“What we’re not going to do today is litter…”). Al handed Mei his crutch and Paninya gave Al a ride on her back, trotting side by side with Den, who was as thrilled as any dog to be going on two walks in a day. They went hand in prosthetic or leathery hand going down steep inclines, held branches out of the way for mobility’s sake, snapped a few photos for the aesthetic. The cool smell of rain and the calling of birds made for, if nothing else, a fun afternoon—Winry almost forgot that they’d come out here to investigate and not just hang out.

It was only a matter of time before things went south, as they tended to when Winry lost her diligence.

“Hey, you guys, what’s that over there?” asked Alphonse, so observant, innocent enough.

Winry squinted as she followed the line drawn by Al’s pointer finger, running her tongue over her front teeth where her braces used to be, like she always did when she was thinking hard. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but it certainly didn’t take NASA’s finest to notice the small, pale hand laying in the leaves, surely connected to a whole something that was conveniently hidden off the path just past a rotting fallen log, a stone’s throw from the running creek.

It was uncanny the way the whole forest seemed to fall silent just as their group of friends did.

The first thing no one tells you about seeing a dead body is what to do if you see a dead body where there otherwise shouldn’t have been one.

The second thing they don’t tell you is how to fill the first half a minute or so of absolute silence after one of your more reactive friends (in this case, Paninya) tugs the sleeve of your sweatshirt and whispers to the group: “Holy shit, is that, like, a human hand?”

A still hand. A very still hand. An unusually super still hand.

The third thing they don’t tell you about seeing a dead body is the appropriate reaction to seeing a dead body.

A small flock of birds took flight as a chorus of the group’s collective anxiety and disgust rang and shouted and echoed through the otherwise peaceful wood.

“Oh my GOD.”

“Nope! Nope! Nope!”

“Wow, I’m gonna be sick, I’m actually gonna be sick.”

“ _Whaaaaaaaaaat_ the _fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck_.”

“ _It’sabodyit’sabodyohmygodit’sabody_.”

Ed, staunchly unimpressed as he took a great inhale and on the exhale, said: “Is it, though?”

Winry’s head spun to her right to peer at him with all the disgust she could possibly muster, but all Ed offered her was a shrug of his shoulders. “What? It could be anything, really, we’re just not sure.”

“ _Aren’t_ we?” Lan Fan deadpanned. “Because I’m definitely looking at a palm, and one, two, three, four, five fingers.”

“I feel like if we were looking at a dead body, we should’ve been able to smell it by now,” Mei noted, clearly ill-at-ease.

“Sure, sure,” Ling, on the other hand, sounded almost careless, “or, that’s not just a dead body, but it’s a _fresh_ dead body.”

The remaining six friends let out a collective groan, Den barked in solidarity.

“I can’t help but thinking we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here,” Al said.

“Right? Like sure, that’s a hand, but we can’t even see it’s face from all the way back here,” Ed pointed now, the metal detector shut off without notice. “We could be looking at anything. Like a dummy, or like a mannequin up at Lyra’s boutique, across from the Curtises?”

Somewhere in Ed’s tone, Winry could tell even he thought his own guess was a reach, not that she could blame him, still not knowing what to make of it herself. She sighed, tilting her head and squinting harder at the body—seeing her reaction, the rest of their gang followed, tilting their heads and squinting hard at the offending object in the distance. But, Winry thought to herself, look at anything long enough and it’ll start to seem like the most normal thing in the world, right?

Ling protested next. “No way, absolutely not,” his low black ponytail swaying as he shook his head. “Look at how blue their fingers are from here. Have any of you seen a mannequin get so cold that they turned blue? I, for one, have not.”

“Maybe it was an artistic choice,” Paninya offered, still short of convinced. “Maybe Lyra paid extra for blue fingered mannequins?”

“Lyra _does_ make good money up at that boutique,” said Ed.

“That she does,” Al replied. 

Sticking the shovel she carried into the ground to stand on it’s own, Winry had an idea. “You know,” she turned to face her friends, “if you’re so sure it definitely isn’t a dead body, why don’t you go get a look at it, just to make sure?”

She might as well have just sucked the air out of their lungs herself. “ _No!_ ” Ed exclaimed, then coughed, his face reddening faster than he could collect himself. “But, uh, you all can go take a look, if you want. I’m already certain.”

“Chicken!” Paninya teased.

“I am not!”

“Well, one of us should go take a look at it,” Lan Fan nearly whispered. The group went quiet again, with nothing but Den’s happy panting to fill the empty space again.

“Let’s draw rock-paper-scissors for it,” said Mei, twisting one of her long pleats with her finger.

“Absolutely not,” said Winry.

“Let’s do it,” said Paninya.

Each member of the gang started with one fist in the middle, experts enough in the age-old ritual to not need two hands. Fate would be sealed in as quickly as best-two-out-of-three.

“Rock, paper, scissors _, shoot_.”

“Rock, paper, scissors, _shoot_.”

“Rock, paper, scissors, _shoo—damnit_.”

Winry scowled, kicking a stray pebble up with her boots, helpless to protest the laws of rock-paper-scissors. Her friends _oooooooo’d_ and gawked, their relief at being spared the first peak at the dead body like a physical weight on her shoulders.

“You gotta go check now! You have to!” Paninya exclaimed.

“Do you need us to go with you? We can all go together?” Al offered her with an apologetic smile.

“Rules are rules,” Winry groaned, resigned to her fate. She handed Paninya the shovel and Mei Den’s leash before she turned on her heel out of the circle and faced the log, her now free hands resting on her hips. The arm hadn’t moved, not even a pinch.

A clap on her shoulders from behind, giving her a quick, supportive shake. “You got this, Winry, all you gotta do is look at it’s face. Nothing else,” said Ed.

“Actually, doing anything else would be a big mistake, considering after this we’re probably going to have to call the police. We don’t wanna tamper with any evidence,” Winry replied, mostly to herself as she stared straight ahead, honing in on the blue fingers, taking her first few hesitant steps away from the group.

“Woah, do you think we’ll get treated as suspects?” Paninya asked in a hushed voice.

“Let’s not to get too far ahead of ourselves,” Al repeated, but like a chill was running down his spine this time.

“You think she’s gonna throw up?” Ling whispered.

“Her stomach is made of stronger stuff,” Ed said, if a bit uncertain, letting his words hang inconclusive until he added, “I mean, for the most part…”

“I can hear you all!” yelled Winry, her heavy feet only having gotten her halfway to hell.

“We love you! Stay strong!” said Mei, cupping her heads to call at full-volume.

She was close now, close enough to smell the rot of the bark, the rustle of running creek water. Three more steps and she’d be able to get a good look at whatever—whoever it was they were looking at. Winry closed her eyes and took a deep breath, listening to the whisper-not-whispers of her friends behind her as she counted down.

_3_

“But deadass, this would be the craziest fucking thing.”

_2_

“Did any missing persons come up recently?”

_1_

“I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast this morning, how do you expect me to know that?”

_Jump._

Winry’s eyes flew open as she leapt ahead to look around the black mossy log. The pit of anxiety bubbling in her chest disappeared almost completely on sight, her shoulders much looser.

“See!” she shouted towards the group, taking the hand and pulling to hold the body up for them all to see. “It’s just a doll!”

The wave of relief was palpable and audible, each of her friends taking a deep breath as they unclutched the coat sleeve they were white knuckling, stopped biting the nails they’d been munching. Winry scanned each expression, analyzing the way respite colored Paninya’s, Ling’s, Lan Fan’s, Mei’s faces, and stopped—The Elrics had turned to give each other a look, frowning.

She wished for just a moment, she knew what they were thinking when they looked at each other like that.

Winry turned the doll in her hands to hold at the waist, like she might hold a baby out in front of her. The details hit her all at once: long brown hair, an eerily life-like face and fingers, a gingham sun dress…

And a leg wrapped in tinfoil.

“Brother, haven’t we seen that doll before?” Alphonse said to Ed once she’d trudged back to the rest of the group. He gestured to Winry with his hand, pointing upwards to have her hold up the doll again. When Winry did, Ed squinted at it, brow furrowed, tapping his chin. It didn’t take long for the answer to come to him.

“That’s—”

“ _Samantha_ ,” Winry, Al, and Ed finished the thought in unison.

“Knock on wood,” Paninya joked.

“Who’s Samantha?” Mei looked up to ask Al, Den’s leash still firm in her grip; Den, however, was rearing to get closer to the doll.

“It’s the name of this doll, she belongs to this little girl named Nina Tucker who used to live in our neighborhood just around the corner,” Al replied; when Winry held the doll to Den’s nose, her tail begun to wag furiously.

“She used to carry this thing around all the time,” Ed explained, a fondness creeping into his voice with every word. “Her dad works with Hohenheim, so sometimes he’d have us and Winry take turns babysitting when her parents split up and stuff. She moved to another town with her mom well over a year ago, so we haven’t seen her for a while.”

“Cute kid,” Lan Fan, of all people, piped up, a small smile playing across her face. Winry was surprised she remembered, given they only would’ve met a handful of times two whole summers ago. “Her dog was massive. Just seeing them around together was pretty funny.”

“Wouldn’t she have taken this with her? When she moved?” asked Ling, bending over, likely to get a closer look at the moss growing on the dress, the rat nests in the wet, unkempt hair.

Al poked at one of Samantha’s eyes, that seemed to only roll closed despite being held right-side up. “It’s not unlikely that she lost it down here sometime, we aren’t far from Dr. Tucker’s house at all.”

“Makes enough sense,” Winry paused, “but who would’ve brought her down here?”

“You mentioned her dad, right?” Mei suggested. “I don’t know, some nice sunny Saturday, maybe he brough her down on a walk?”

Paninya’s expression went grim as she rested her chin on the handle of the shovel. “Would he have, though?”

No one rushed to answer that question; it was a silent, common knowledge, that if Nina hadn’t run to meet them when she saw them outside, if she hadn’t been the only child in the neighborhood her own age, if she hadn’t been so lonely in that duplex with her dad working all the time, they might not have gotten to know her as well as they had. Shou was a nervous, anxious energy, and it was maybe too hard for all of them, just teenagers, to fault him for much, but the answer to Paninya’s question was no, he wouldn’t have taken Nina for a walk along the creek in the woods on a nice Saturday. He wouldn’t have spent time with her much at all.

“So now what?” Winry asked, watching the taut tug of the leash as she took the handle back from Mei as Den began to sniff further down the path towards the creek and the mouth of the stone cave. “Den’s ready to keep going.” 

No one rushed to answer that question either.

No one until Paninya, tucking her hands in her coat pockets, tapping her foot, eyes all sorts of anxious, heaved a long sigh.

“Alright, no one else is gonna say how weird this is, so I will: I don’t know how I feel about going for a peaceful stroll along the creek to find a dead body—” at least two people in their company gasped, Winry wasn’t sure who it was, “I don’t like the vibes I’m getting and I don’t feel good about it. So there.”

“Now who’s the chicken?” Ling snorted, Paninya reaching over to sock him in the arm.

“She’s got a point. Look at the cats,” Lan Fan pointed toward the creek. Past a few trees and down another small incline walked the feline family they’d all come to know, moving as unified as cats could possibly go in the direction of the tunnel, in the direction the gang was headed. “Cats signal dead things, it’s written in like, a thousand different legends.”

“Okay, that’s written in legends, but this is real life, right now,” said Mei, sounding just short of how assertive her words might’ve seemed on paper. “I mean, we found a doll, not a body.”

“But who are we to assume that between the felon’s super-secret chemistry notes and the neglected neighbor’s baby doll that we won’t stumble upon something more sinister, hm?” countered Paninya, the handle of the shovel moving with her as she spoke with her hands. “I don’t know, just a concept!”

“But that’s why we have to go, isn’t it?” Every head spun to look in one direction—Ed was unusually quiet, eyes wide as he looked toward each of their friends, one by one. He was taking this seriously. “If Ni –“ he stopped himself with a gulp “— if _someone’s_ body is down there, and just one other person out there missed them, then it would be good that we found them, right?”

Alphonse, naturally, was the first to affirm, wasting no time in nodding. “Best case scenario, we find another metal safe. Worst case scenario, we’re the reason someone knows where their missing loved one went. Most likely scenario, we find nothing,” he paused, deeply considerate, “and we pet a few cats.”

Mei’s frown melted first, giving that a soft giggle. Then Ling, then Lan Fan. Winry was ready, but it was Paninya who waited, mulling over Al’s outcomes in her head, the turning gears almost visible through her ears and behind her eyes.

She threw her head back with a groan. “You two really love sticking your noses in whatever trouble you can find, don’t you?”

Ed and Al scoffed, one of their few expressions, given how different they could be, that truly mirrored one another. “We do get that a lot,” Al admitted, nodding just out of time with Ed’s affirmation.

“Are we doing this?” he asked, seemingly just to Winry, before Edward turned his blond head to look at every member of their group to check-in. Not one objected.

“Following your lead, Fullmetal,” said Ling, genuine concern filling in the spaces that was usually reserved just for his absurdity, and they moved on, thus starting the second leg of their journey.

It was like the mud they trudged through was grabbing hold of their rubber boots with each step, daylight fading fast and taking the bustling of the woods with them. Everything seemed quieter—the hush of the creek water, the meow of the cats, the echo of stray droplets falling inside the dark and shady tunnel. Ed, in particular, was concentrated; not once did he stop like Al or Mei to pet any of the cats running from Den as he cautiously directed the metal detector down along the slate, the _beep beep beep_ providing a beat.

They decided to split up around the tunnel, phone flashlights and real flashlights out at the ready, to better scan the area for anything more interesting. Lan Fan and Ling went into the mouth of the tunnel, Al and Mei took the water’s edge, Ed and Paninya crossed the creek to walk up and down the other side, and Winry stood in the same place she had early that morning, now holding Samantha, letting the whole of Den’s adjustable leash unwind as the old girl snorted and sniffed through the terrain.

Maybe Den was losing energy, or maybe there really was nothing else to find—once in a while, she’d tug a little on the leash, and Winry would concede, she’d tug a little more, and Winry would concede again. She didn’t have enough time to protest when Den splashed into the creek water (well, they’d find out later how well the leg did after being wet) and crossed over to the other side, jogging past Paninya and Ed. Before she knew it, the toes of her boots were wet, the soft tide licking the rubber, and it was almost her turn to cross—

A pained yelp and a splash from inside the tunnel. Winry’s heart almost jumpstarted itself before she heard, to her surprise, the utter side-splitting guffaws of Lan Fan, a hooting and hollering she never would’ve expected from her otherwise serious friend.

“Did you really just trip over nothing?” Ed called, the tail end of his question echoing inside the tunnel. Al and Mei’s flashlights turned to the mouth to see as he emerged, Ling, black bangs plastered to his forehead, soaking wet, and Lan Fan, in tears just behind him.

“My boot got stuck!” Ling complained, wiping moisture from his eyes with equally wet hands.

“You’re like, one of the only ones of us who has all their limbs and _you’re_ the one who got stuck?” Paninya sputtered through near-manic laughter, everyone else’s snickers and giggles not too much quieter.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ling crossed his arms, still unable to keep his usual smile from spreading wide across his face, “you won’t laugh at my jokes, but you’ll laugh at my misfortune. Some friends you all are.”

“To be fair, watching people get hurt is the highest form of humor.”

“Besides impersonations obviously,” Ling took two wet strands of ponytail and pulled them under his nose, hunching over with a frown and a glare. “Who am I? Guess.”

Ling didn’t need to be the most convincing Old Man Fu to keep the laughter rolling, whatever tension at finding Nina’s old doll fading with the sun. They’d need to leave pretty soon, lest they let Ling catch a cold. Winry made a plan in her head: they’d get back to the house, drink some cocoa, disband to finish any last minute homework, and Monday after school, she’d get rid of Heathcliff’s case down at the local authorities and hope that wherever he was, he’d get his belongings back.

The leash began to furl back into the handle as Den came running toward the group again, carrying something small and lightly-colored in her mouth. Winry whistled for her, the gait impressive, and watched as Den shook off her wet coat onto Ed and Paninya, much to their chagrin.

“Hey girl, what’d you find?” Ed asked Den, reaching to scratch the top of her head and take whatever it was she’d been carrying in her mouth, cheeks still warm from the laughter. The rest of their group were distracted, chattering between themselves, so it was Winry who noticed the way Ed’s breathing stopped first, the way he’d frozen, at the item Den had dropped into his palm.

“ _Oh no_.”

“Edward?” she called to him, and he didn’t answer; Ed didn’t even look up at her, Paninya now too looking over his shoulder, her face, of all things, _frightened_. Without a moment’s hesitation, Winry stepped into the creek, her ankles wading through the water with every trudge to cross the river. “Edward? What’d she find?”

Winry watched in horror as Ed held up for the group to see: a familiar white sneaker, decorated with a little daisy on the clasp.

  
  



	3. grey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 10638 words later.........................

She was embarrassed to admit, but it took Winry a smidge longer than it should have for her to realize no one was going to relieve her from her seat in the Central Police Station waiting room.

“So what are you gonna do with the safe now?” Al had asked her between sips of hot chocolate, a quilt thrown over his shoulders, worn from supporting his balance during their long hike. It was just the three of them and a heavy, gross unease sitting at a quiet kitchen table, now that everyone else had left for home similarly dejected by Sunday’s events. The dull light above the stove just barely illuminated the corners of the room where tile met peeling, flowery wallpaper. “We didn’t really get anywhere on the equations page, and didn’t find anything else—” a pause “—that’d help us figure out what the case was out there for, anyway.”

Winry watched the sad, lone marshmallow bob in her hot chocolate in time with Den’s breathing on her feet from where she’d curled up beneath the table. “Yeah, I think it’s time to turn it in. All of it.” Al nodded, Ed didn’t. “It wasn’t ours to begin with, and maybe it was never something we were gonna be able to figure out. I’m sure Heathcliff or whoever lost the safe is probably missing it now, or the papers inside, or the USB. You don’t keep things in a safe to not miss them when they’re gone.”

“I think if someone was missing it, they wouldn’t have buried it in the woods like it’s pirate loot for five years,” said Ed, frown creasing it’s way to permanence along his forehead and at the corners of his mouth—Nina used to mash Ed’s face every which way to get him to make funny faces.

Winry sensed that there was something here he couldn’t shake off, something that’d latched onto all of them out in the woods and gripped hard. Not that she believed in ghosts or anything.

“So neither of you care if I take it down to the police station, just to be certain?” she whispered, and for once, neither Elric brother jumped to answer her question. Alphonse peered thoughtfully at the case, sitting on the stove just under the light. Ed looked downcast at his right hand which he unclenched, like his fingers might splay open as they once could, and closed back into a fist.

Which was why she was surprised when he replied, ever so smug: “I think the most responsible thing to do would be to turn it in, sure, but I think what’s really going to happen is you’re going to go down there, they’re going to take your name, and then let you sit in the waiting room until the station closes.”

Winry had rolled her eyes at him; glad to know even in their collective disgust, he still found room to tease her. “Come on, surely they’d have to have someone come take a look?”

No, in fact, surely they did not.

She’d gotten here by bus as quickly as she could leave the school grounds without work at the garage to run to on Monday – a twenty-minute ride one-way. After waiting behind a mishmash line of people, all attempting to report something or obtain something from or otherwise talk to the nasally, irritated man behind the bulletproof glass, it was Winry’s turn. And as soon as it was her turn, the man behind the glass wanted it to be over.

“So you’ll need a lost property report?” he’d cut her carefully prepared explanation off a whole six words in, just long enough for her to heave the heavy metal case onto the counter.

“I suppose?” Winry stuttered, like the high school sophomore she was and not the city employee, with a knowledge of common citizen reports, she apparently appeared to be.

“You suppose?” The man scowled at her, tapping each square pad of each of his square fingers against the metal counter. “Did you or did you not find lost property?”

“I did.”.

“And you found it, correct? Out of the blue, no funny business involved? No theft, no murder.”

At the mention of murder, the image of Samantha and the shoe bubbled behind Winry’s eyes; she tried blinking, but they wouldn’t go away. It’d been hard to shake, all of it, from the dirty aluminum wrapped around a dirty doll’s leg, to the mud-stained daisy shoe clasp, to the look on Mr. Tucker’s face when they’d all marched up to his front door, took pause, and knocked and knocked until he answered. Shou Tucker, pale and gaunt, always looked anxious, but at the moment, Winry found it strange how skeletal he’d turned upon seeing Samantha, that his sunken black eyes couldn’t seem to match the relief of his words, “oh thank you for finding these! You know Nina, always getting into something or other. She’d been crushed when she lost these…”

"That was fishy," Paninya had turned to all of them and said, flat-out, as they wandered away from the Tucker house with none of the solace they'd sought. "We're all on the same page about that being weird, right?"

The man behind the counter sniffed his stuffed, square nose, and Winry was pulled back into the moment, replying softly with a hesitant “right.”

It was too late, beady eyes were examining her up and down, like she might as well have just drooled on the counter. “Then take this form—” he was speaking so slowly to her too, like she really was a joke, _awesome, her favorite_ “—and fill it out and bring it back up when you’re done.”

Pen and paper in hand, Winry scurried as quickly as she could away from that dreadful interaction. Or at least as quickly as she could, half-dragging the heavy metal safe, to a plastic blue seat at the end of the waiting room by the hallway. It hadn’t seemed like it’d been so long at first, between all the writing, the hustle and bustle of city employees and civilians walking by, the counting of mismatched tiles along the floor as she debated which word to use, what details to include, which to omit. If honesty was the best policy, which she was willing to concede, then she’d have to include _everything_ everything, which turned into curly, girly handwriting that scribbled across the whole front and back of the form she’d been given. This meticulous process took up her first hour spent down at the station.

This also made the beady eyes of the square man behind the counter bake in his own irritation. “And the case?” He asked her through clenched teeth once she’d slid him the completed form through the opening facedown, extra essay side up.

“What about it?”

“Aren’t you going to bring it up? To turn in? Is that not the reason you brought it in the first place?”

“Uh, what happens to it? Once I turn it in?” Winry asked, the tail end of her inquiry weakening as the square face behind the counter burned red. Maybe it’d been a long day? Maybe she was being too pushy? Maybe he was just an asshole.

“Ma’am, once you turn in an item to police, the owner has ninety days to claim it before it’s sold for auction or thrown out. Our secretary will be by to file it soon, and I’m sure, judging by the obvious care and concern with which that item was treated—” caked in mud, dented, unable to click completely closed “—the owner will be by to grab it in no time at _all_.”

“Can I talk to an officer? Before it gets taken away?”

“You can talk to an officer, sure, if you’re submitting this as evidence to a _crime_ , ma’am. Which you shouldn’t be, since you found it out of the blue, correct?”

Was it possible, Winry was pained to ask herself, for the evidence of a crime to be found out of the blue?

“Right—”

A missing safe containing documents pertinent to a currently incarcerated young man could mean nothing, but it certainly had to mean one of two, and only two things.

“Withholding evidence is a criminal offense, ma’am—”

That safe was either evidence that could help Heathcliff, or evidence that wouldn’t help Heathcliff. And Winry still had a hard time shaking the fear etched into the photograph at the top of the article, growing out of the corners and curling around the text.

“Can I at least wait until the secretary comes by to hand it to them myself?” Winry pressed, her voice rising like maybe she’d be heard this time. “I just want to make sure it gets where it’s supposed to go.”

It was like it took all of his energy, but the square, sweaty man turned in his seat, however slowly, to steal a glance towards the clock. Whatever he saw must have satisfied him enough, because he turned back to Winry with a little (and only a little) less tension knotting between his square eyebrows. “Sure, no problem,” he replied, and Winry exhaled, “Just take a seat, I’ll call you when she comes by.”

Sitting, her written report laid neatly in the seat to her left and the case waiting in the shadow of her plastic chair, was what consumed almost all of the second hour spent down at the station. She could wait, she would wait, something nameless whispered in her ear that she just had to stay a little bit longer. Something else more recognizable, nay, her stomach, grumbled at the prospect of not getting home to dinner sooner rather than later.

If she wasn’t going to be the one to sort through this whole mess, boy, did Winry want to meet the person who would. Good news, she brought a book. Bad news, it was starting to get dark outside.

Of all the footsteps that crossed the great hall beside the station waiting room, there was one particularly fast set of footsteps clipping clearly across the linoleum that Winry observed as unique to one person each time they went by. It was like a quick beat on a muted drum, a little too lithe and jumpy to really make impact, but very purposeful. She noticed, but was hardly half-interested in the trotting as it made it’s way into the waiting room and took something up to the counter—her assigned chapters of _The Crucible_ were at least a little more interesting—so she’d only really half-heard the brisk walking grow in volume until it disappeared.

“Excuse me, Miss?”

The footsteps belonged to a tall man. Specifically, the tall man looming over Winry now with his hands shoved lazily in his pockets, who she supposed must’ve been about six feet, give or take, as she craned her neck to look up at him from her seat. He had rectangular glasses held together with a thin silver wire, and Winry decided he was probably handsome in spite of the chinstrap of facial hair along his square jaw. He seemed friendly though, in the way teachers at school would be friendly with her even if she’d never had them for class.

“Sorry to interrupt your reading, but I’ve been running around this building all day and I feel like I’ve passed you sitting here a number of times,” the man explained; he had a weird sense of cheer, but it might’ve only been weird because Winry was still hungry. “How long have you been waiting?”

Winry turned to look at the clock, only vaguely taking note of the utter lack of life in the waiting room, and frowned once she’d registered the time. “Almost two hours.”

“Just waiting? Really?” even weirder than this man’s cheer, Winry decided, was that he didn’t seem to be mocking her as he spoke. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Well, my report wound up being really long and I wanted to hand it off personally to the secretary when they came by to collect the Lost and Found items at the end of the day, so they said they’d call me back when they were ready,” she replied, gesturing toward the counter behind the glass.

“How much did you write?”

“Front and back, with a little more at the end.”

“Wow, that much verbiage for one metal box?” The man gave a quick nod to the safe sitting under her chair, the anchor that tied Winry to this single spot.

She shrugged, feeling a bit sheepish because the man had made his observation sound like a compliment, a bit sheepish because she’d nearly forgotten the safe was there at all. “I didn’t want to miss anything that could be important in getting this thing where it belongs.”

That was the right answer, something twinkled behind the lens of the man’s glasses as he stuck out his hand in front of her face to shake. “You seem very committed to doing right by that case. What’s your name, Miss?”

“Winry. Winry Rockbell.”

“Hi Winry, my name is Maes Hughes.” Winry thought she could give a firm handshake, but Hughes had her beat, she thought, by quite a lot. He moved with much less patience than he spoke with into the seat just next to Winry, taking her report in his hands and resting it atop where his legs crossed. “Winry, can I let you in on a little secret about bureaucracy?”

“I think I might already know the secret,” Winry frowned.

“You probably do, you seem like a very smart girl,” said Hughes, shooting her another merry smile as he took to explaining in a much lower tone of voice. “You came in at the end of the day with an item that requires a great deal of paperwork to take care of. If our square friend behind the reception desk—“ Winry broke into a grin before she could stop herself “—had actually accepted your item, he wouldn’t be able to leave until he’d processed the paperwork. By making you wait to turn it in at the very last minute, he could reasonably put it off until tomorrow. Or better yet, if you just left and decided you were wasting your time, he wouldn’t have to do it at all.”

“That seems terribly rude,” Winry whispered sullenly.

“It is, but unless you bring in something particularly interesting, which people rarely do, it’s not really someone’s personal item, not to him. It’s just more paperwork to do and more space that gets taken up in the Lost and Found.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I work downstairs in the Forensics Lab where all the fun evidence inevitably ends up,” Hughes beamed a little as he pulled a Central City Hall ID card out of the front pocket of his button-up, showing Winry an identical beaming photograph of one MAES J. HUGHES, STAFF before putting it back in his pocket with a pat. “And you are in luck, because I am qualified to be the one who makes sure that case gets back to wherever it belongs.”

Winry clapped her book shut maybe a smidge faster than was necessary. “Really? You’ll do that?”

“Sure, do you mind if I ask you a few questions about it? Where you found it, the whole lot?” Hughes inquired as he turned the report over and over as he shot up faster than a rocket. Winry took that as her cue, too, to heave the case and her backpack with her as she stood straight.

“ _Yes,_ that’s what I asked for when I got here and that guy at the counter acted like it was the _stupidest_ thing he’d ever heard.” Hughes was nodding with her as she whispered, mouthed a quick “I know” before taking off, waving at the square man in question.

“Yo Don! I got this one!” he called across the waiting room, jovial as ever; Don gave a single thumbs up without so much as a glance up from his computer screen.

“Geez, would it kill a guy to smile?” Hughes muttered to her once they were a safe distance away, back into the great, ornate, and now the empty main entrance to City Hall towards an adjacent wing. Their footsteps sounded much heavier out where they could echo past the chandelier to the high arched ceilings, Winry working double-time to keep up with Hughes’ long strides. She watched out the front windows at the streetlights as they began to buzz and flicker to life.

“Uh, Mr. Hughes, isn’t it getting late? Do you really have time to look at this for me?”

“Sure, I tend to work late anyway. I’m one of the more recent hires, I only graduated college last May, so I have lots to prove, lots of people to impress,” Hughes explained; Winry liked the change of being spoken to like she was another adult. “It’s how it goes when you’re green, see.”

“That sounds awful.”

“I’d like to tell you it’s not, but alas, it is.” Winry giggled at Hughes’ dramatic sigh, the exaggerated slump of his shoulders as he lamented. “Don’t grow up if you can help it, Miss Rockbell, being an adult is the _worst_. The only upside is that I get to go home and see my wife at the end of the day, which almost balances out all the hours this job keeps me away from her, but only _almost_.”

“Your wife?”

The mere mention seemed to put a spring back into Hughes’ step. He held the door to a small, stone stairwell open for Winry, only to nearly skip past her once she’d gotten through. The stairwell light was sterile in comparison to the soft yellow bulbs illuminating the browns and tans and golds of the first floor, and it was only getting darker as they descended lower and lower with each step into the basement.

Mr. Hughes, in the whole five minutes they’d spent together, already tended to speak like he was being timed, and Winry presumed he’d hit his upper limit, at least before she’d mentioned his wife.

“Miss Rockbell, you have to understand,” was how it started, and then Winry admittedly got a little distracted trying to navigate the stairs while carrying the thick heavy case. She came back around during the “and we had the most beautiful wedding over the summer, and she was the most beautiful bride that has ever been a bride, probably ever, in the history of brides—” And then they’d gotten to the basement, lights grey and dim to match the grey, dim tiles, the eggshell walls, and Winry was able to collect her grip on the safe and rejoin Hughes in the part of the monologue that went something like “and she is so smart and so talented and everyone told me the honeymoon phase would pass but I love her more every day.”

The pair continued to go by more and more thick metal doors with small square windows, only differentiated between one another where Winry could look in and see lab equipment or office supplies, desks and sinks, if any lights were on at all. Unlike his jabbering, Hughes came to a rearing halt in the middle of the hall, pulling a small ring of keys out of his navy slacks to start to unlock Room 119.

“Mr. Hughes?” said Winry the moment she’d found a spot to get a word in edgewise, as Mr. Hughes had hesitated when he matched the wrong key to his office door.

“Yeah?”

“Do you love your wife?”

There was a pause before Hughes tossed out the most buoyant of laughs, straight from the gut, that echoed down to the end of the basement hall so long Winry couldn’t even see the end of it. “Oh Miss Rockbell, how could you have possibly guessed?” he joked, flicking on a light switch and waving her inside before he closed the office door behind her.

Well, if it hadn’t been for the Ballad of Gracia that Hughes had sung all the way down to the basement, the skipping and waggling of wedding bands, the photographs might’ve been a giveaway. A basement office meant no windows, and Winry wondered if the stale white room that had been cleared out for Mr.Hughes, giving up its previous position as the world’s most boring postage stamp, was maybe intended for use as a supply closet. The room was so small that his desk had to fit perpendicular to the back wall, or else there’d be no way to get around it to take a seat, lest Hughes want to sit facing a white brick wall all day long. He seemed to be making do though; on the corner of a perfectly clean desk sat a small collection of photo frames, mismatched in size and material. While Mr. Hughes bounced around the room, pulling up a wooden chair for Winry and setting her report down on the desk, shuffling through his desk drawers for a barrage of post-it notes and three pens, Winry looked closer. Gracia was just as beautiful as Hughes had described, so she couldn’t call him a liar, as exaggerated as he was, and her wedding dress was the stuff of fairytales, with a long lace veil and a Cinderella-sized skirt. They’d gone somewhere tropical on their honeymoon, she supposed, by the matching Hawaiian shirts and bright sunshine in the photo they were in together. There was another photo of some kind of sporting triumph, Hughes and a series of other dirty men in muddy uniforms, mid-victory cry, holding up a large golden trophy; some of the same men had cleaned up well enough for another framed photo from the wedding and it was easy to match faces when they stood in a straight line, very serious and very spiffy for the camera.

It was a fuzzy sort of thought, knowing her own father had left her similar photos in picture books in Granny’s attic, and to realize most people who lived to stand for such photos usually stayed alive to keep them on their desks.

There was a brightly colored box shoved under her nose before she knew it; Mr. Hughes munched on a granola bar that smelled like blueberry as he jiggled a cardboard box again, the nutrition label just a few inches from Winry’s face.

“Please take something, I could hear your stomach growling all the way down the stairs,” he said cheerfully.

“Oh, thank you,” Winry reached for the first granola bar she could grab; it wound up being chocolate peanut butter. “Is on the desk okay?” she asked, the weight of the safe growing heavier with each passing moment.

“Of course, of course, right.” And the stands of the photos were carefully folded in so they could be placed to the side, giving Winry plenty of room to set Number 3 up on the desk and slide it to the center. They stood over it in silence for a moment, like they were waiting for the safe to speak to them candidly, now that they were all in private.

Hughes took the time to chew through the last bite of granola bar before he shoved his hands in his pockets and sighed. “I’m going to be honest with you, Miss Rockbell,” it was sudden, how serious he became, “I didn’t bring you down here because I took pity on you or the hours you spent wasting in the station waiting room.”

Record scratch, freeze frame.

Before Winry could decide how much she didn’t like the sound of that, Mr. Hughes had slid open the bottom drawer of his desk and yanked something out of it with a deft swiftness, taking the space beside the safe with an angry _clunk_. Her jaw dangled open instead—beside the case Den had found sat a much cleaner, unbusted identical metal safe.

Words, Winry, find them: “I—you have—it’s another one!”

“I know, I know,” Hughes, unflappable, just nodded along with her rambling, lifting up the bottom of the safe to reveal a matching painted red number. “Listen, I just about had the same reaction when I saw yours upstairs! Miss Rockbell, meet Sister Case Number 5.”

It was like a sprint, the zero to one hundred of the number of red thread trails connecting the case to Heathcliff, to the woods and the shoe and the doll, to the creek and the cats and the smell and the whole city, for all Winry knew. One hundred red threads tied at her waist pulling her along but each running in a different direction and she didn’t have the time, the space, the knowledge to even know where to start.

She started with the realization that she was gawking at the two safes, the granola bar limp in her hand. Mr. Hughes had his finger tapping his chin like he too was in deep thought before Winry remembered this was exactly his job.

“First thoughts?” Hughes asked.

“I have so many questions,” Winry replied.

“Ditto,” Hughes pulled his wheeled office chair towards him, Winry miming the action with the spare wooden chair that’d been pulled up to the desk for her. “Which is why I asked you all the way down to my office, so I could get as much detail as I could about where you found this and what you know about it.”

Winry felt her brows furrow. “I’m afraid I don’t actually know that much at all, Mr. Hughes, I just found it.”

“That might be true, but right now, as far as I know, you’re the one person I can speak to who knows the absolute most about this particular case, right here,” Hughes pointed with his left hand to her Number 3 safe. “And I’m the only person you can speak to who knows the absolute most about this safe,” he slid his hand over to the Number 5 safe, gold wedding band gleaming despite the dullest of lightbulbs that hung overhead. “If we both put our heads together, we’re bound to end up with more information than we started with, right?”

And so Winry begun the retelling of her story with Den, how she’d had sniffed out a metal container on Sunday in the woods, how something about the smell made Den go nuts. Mr. Hughes was an attentive listener, and in the same way he spoke to her like an equal, he heard out every detail of her story like any and all of it could be important. His eyebrows bobbed up and down at the important parts of emphasis and periodically he’d scribble a point down on the nearest post-it note, nodding as she spoke so she didn’t think he’d checked out.

“So what was inside your safe?”

Winry swung open the case by hooking her fingers at the dent. “Oh here, let me show you. There’s a broken USB, an old grant letter, and,” she stopped.

The equations page, the Philosopher’s Stone page, it was gone. She didn’t understand, she’d been so, so careful getting the safe from home to school to here in one, grimy piece. Where could it have possibly go—

_Edward._

“Interesting, interesting,” Hughes muttered to himself as he pored over the grant letter, his square glasses low on his nose, utterly oblivious to Winry’s sheer panic, rage, the works.

_“Withholding evidence is a criminal offense, ma’am—”_

She was cool, she could play it cool. Ed might’ve been bent on getting her tossed in juvie hall, but Winry had willpower; she stayed utterly still and controlled until Hughes turned his attention into another desk drawer long enough for her to slide her report, the one that now mentioned stolen evidence incriminating her to years in prison, surely, onto her lap, fold it in half, and deposit it with the same hand that’d held the granola bar, into the top flap of her backpack with one swift motion.

The first thing she was going to do when she got home and ate dinner was kill Edward Elric, probably.

Mr. Hughes seemed to be similarly wrapped up in his own collection of red threads; when he sat back up in his swivel seat, he carefully unfurled a square map. A map of Central, to be specific—it didn’t take her long, looking at it upside down, to spot the corner the garage should’ve been on, where her neighborhood, her school, the library were in the maze of green grass and white lines intended to be roads. Hughes’ was the picture of concentration, eyebrows pulled together and tongue poking out of his lips as he ever so carefully followed the pale pink latitude and longitude lines to place an “x” by the print label toward the southeast corner of the map: AQUROYA CREEK.

“By an exposed run-off tunnel you said?”

“Yeah, a little north of where the name is.” Winry demonstrated with her pointer finger the approximate path she took from her house down the street, to the general area she’d usually turn off the path towards the woods. She hadn’t expected to get lost so quickly at a bird’s eye view, but she supposed that’s why she and her friends were the only ones ever down there, or so they thought. “It’s not a popular part of the trail, I’ve never seen any hikers around it when I’ve been out.”

Hughes hummed, taking his pointer finger to a great “X” to the northwest of where Winry’s finger rested, toward a part of Central known for being a little bit fancier and wealthier than the rest of town. “I found this safe in an auction, actually, after an abandoned home by the train station burnt down a few months ago—that’s what happens to items no one claims, see, they go to auction. The safe went for a whole fifty bucks.”

“You spent a whole fifty bucks on that thing?”

“Well, not for the safe itself,” Hughes admitted, opening the top of Number Five slowly; peering inside, Winry noted it’s only contents were a single piece of paper. Another grant from Central Military Academy, just like Heathcliff’s, this time for someone named Julia—

The case clapped closed before Winry could make out any more. “I don’t know how much you know, Miss Rockbell, about some of the legal issues Central State got into a few years back, why they had to turn the military academy over to the state government and all, but I was a student there at the time. And times were strange.

“It was like we all knew an investigation was happening, but what should have been front-page news was a back page column, what was supposed to have been entirely transparent started and finished in a matter of a semester, nowhere to be seen but right under our noses. We’d been told that most of the old administration, or at least, the one’s who hadn’t had the sense to resign, were going to be removed and charged for embezzling student funds, but we were never told how much or how they did it. And suddenly we didn’t have a campus police force either, and tenured professors were gone without replacements. It wasn’t so dramatic at the time, I don’t think most students were given enough information to care beyond how it might affect them personally, let alone in regards to something that seemed like it’d been wrapped up neat with a bow at the end of the year, no problem. So to find what looks like even more stray threads this many years down the line,” Hughes paused, before shooting Winry an attempt at a reassuring smile that turned into something rather tight. “Well, it’s concerning.”

The air hung taut, like a violin string pulled too tightly. “Is that why you’re investigating it all alone? Not as part of a team, or for your job?”

“Ouch, caught me there. You are, genuinely, very bright, Miss Rockbell.” Winry smiled but wouldn’t dwell too much on the compliment, not as Mr. Hughes took a beat to pause, watching the map as he collected his thoughts. “I think I’m doing this for the same reason why you didn’t want to drop off that safe with just anyone earlier: I feel a sense of responsibility to do right by the people who need me to, whoever they are.”

Winry kept that in mind as she trudged on with the rest of her story, how she’d shown the case to her friends, and how they thought that maybe it was part of a really elaborate treasure hunt or something—that got a laugh out of Hughes, but he’d apologized immediately explaining his friends, at that age, “would’ve done the same thing, full-stop”. Her speech involuntarily got slower and slower with every sentence, as she got closer to the part where, well, Paninya had noticed a hand.

“Did you find another case?” Mr. Hughes prompted, watching her expression carefully.

Winry pushed her long hair behind her ear, fussing with her earrings as she thought of a way to best express what happened next. “Well, no, we just—” she took a deep breath, “we found the doll and then a shoe of a little neighbor girl who moved away from her dad’s house down the street to her mom’s house in another town.”

She braced herself for another laugh that didn’t come; Mr. Hughes instead wrote down ‘doll + shoe’ on a square yellow sticky note. “And you think those items are relevant to the safe somehow,” he inferred, very serious.

“I don’t know,” Winry shrugged, her shoulders falling lower and lower. “Like I said, no one’s ever down there but us and our friends. There’s no way she would’ve been down there at all, or so we thought, unless something happened? And we were gonna keep looking, but one of my friends fell in the creek. He probably would’ve caught a cold if we didn’t leave before dark, but we stopped by Nina’s—the neighbor girl—dad’s house to take him the stuff and he seemed…”

Hughes tilted his head in curiosity where she’d trailed off. “Winry?”

“He seemed like he was surprised to see it at all, like he wasn’t supposed to see them ever again,” Winry spilled, letting the weird unease surrounding Shou Tucker flutter onto the table as evidence beside the cases and the map.

“Ah,” was all Hughes said at first, taking his time to pull his chair a little closer to the desk and lean in just to catch Winry at eye level. “I’m sure you’re onto something, Miss Rockbell.”

Something caught Winry’s breath and held it in suspension between the red thread.

“I’m sure he thought he wasn’t going to see any of his daughter’s belongings that day, not after she moved away,” Hughes continued, much, much calmer than she felt, reassuring. “I’m sure he misses her dearly.”

Winry recalled with some vague clarity, Nina talking warmly about her father, Shou picking her up and carrying her home after she’d spent the afternoon with her and the Elrics. “You think so?”

Hughes nodded, very certain. “I think you got it exactly right, something was off about your neighbor that day. My parents got divorced when I was really young myself, so I know how fickle a thing custody can be. Your neighbor might not know when he’ll see his daughter again. Personally, I can’t imagine what it’d be like to go from seeing my kid every day to just, well, not. He probably appreciated you all bringing him the things she lost, he might’ve just had a hard time expressing it. Guys aren’t always great at that kind of thing, whether they’re dads or not,” he ended with a light jest, and the tension eased up with him.

She was old enough now that the few, fuzzy memories Winry had of her parents weren’t going to get any clearer, but she knew she’d been loved, at the core of them all. Even if she didn’t remember the loving, how exactly her father showed how much he loved her, she knew it was true—Nina, too, seemed to know it to be true in the much clearer memories Winry had of her neighbor. There was a thick weight of knowing there, thinking about how much Nina must be missing her dad right now, how much she’d missed her father when she didn’t get to see him every day too.

“Plus, weirder things have been connected than a missing doll and two safes full of university-grant documents, probably. Anything can be evidence,” Hughes continued, thumbing at some of the harsher dents along Number 3. “Maybe you can give your old neighbor a call just to check-in, tell her you helped on a serious investigation into…”

“Into…?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, grin somewhat self-depreciating. “It’s the part of my job I like least, finding out more things but not getting any conclusions, just more unseen possibilities.”

“Can relate,” Winry muttered, thumbing the split ends of her long ponytail in consideration, back into the throes of wondering what all of this could possibly _mean_. “What do you do when you don’t know what to do?”

“Eat something sweet,” Hughes said first, dead-serious, making it all the funnier. “And phone a trusted resource for input.”

“A trusted resource?”

“A friend. Because I get bored. But I have a few smart friends.”

“Only a few?”

“Only a few,” echoed Hughes, emphasis on ‘few’. “You sound like you can still relate.”

Winry thought immediately of her boys, specifically of one gold braid and scuffed black boots. “ _Can_ I,” she huffed.

“Don’t give up on them yet. If they really are too smart for their own good, they probably still need you. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself,” Hughes said with a soft smile before turning his attention back to the dents on the safe, the post-its full of notes, and the other contents of his desk. “Did you have anything else you wanted to add to your story? Any details you didn’t mention but might have even a twinge of importance? Any fun rocks down in the woods?”

As funny as Mr. Hughes could be and as informative as this all was, however, Winry was starving now, and probably had less time than she needed to get through her homework. “I think I got it all.”

“Great, I think you’ve been confined to this building long enough, don’t you?” Hughes rose to his feet, much slower than he had earlier in the afternoon. “I’ll grab you a card so you can email me any other suspicious happenings as you find them, and I’ll walk you out.”

Their footsteps on the way back upstairs were almost muted, but Winry was good at tuning out the noise when she was deep in thought. She’d call Nina, first of all—she wasn’t left a number, but someone in that neighborhood had to know how to get a hold of Nina’s mom. Surely, they’d gotten paranoid for no reason, and there was just another side to the story Winry hadn’t considered yet. She’d keep Mr. Hughes’ card in a safe place as well, her eyes peeled for more safes—knowing there were more lost research files out there only begged a single ‘why?’ but surely with Hughes connecting the dots, the missing Numbers 1, 2, 4, and beyond would wind up exactly where they needed to be.

Winry was good at tuning out the dread too, when she needed reason to be optimistic.

Not that everything was doom and gloom, there was just so much she didn’t know. How did Nina lose her shoe and her doll in the first place? If Heathcliff was in prison now, what happened to the mysterious Julia from Hughes’ case? Was something going on up at Central State, and if so, why didn’t anyone—from the passing cars to the man in the glass box—seem to care?

She might’ve been the only one she knew of who knew the most about the safe Den had found in the woods; she was not comforted at the idea of someone else out there having vital information and not doing anything with it.

“It’s really getting dark out here,” said Hughes, holding the door open for Winry once more to reveal a clear navy sky and a fresh night breeze. “Do you have a parent or other trusted adult you can call to get a ride home?”

Thinking fondly of what her grandmother would say, Winry replied, “I do, but they’d just ask why I didn’t take the bus.”

“I understand, but if my teenager was out getting home alone, I’d want someone to remind her to stay safe. You know, text someone to let them know when she should be home again, don’t stray from the beaten path, that kind of thing.”

Hughes was a nice man, Winry thought, maybe he’d get to have kids to dote over one day as much as he bragged about his wife. “I know, I know, thank you for your concern, Mr. Hughes. I’ll keep all that in mind.”

“That’s a smart girl.” Offering one last friendly smile and another dangerously firm handshake, Hughes started in the direction of the parking lot opposite the bus stop with his own backpack in tow. “Have a good night, Miss Rockbell, and stay safe!” he called with a wave.

Winry waved her hand up high as she spun on her heel to walk to the bus stop, giving herself more than a few steps before looking back once over her shoulder. She didn’t know if she should’ve been surprised to watch Hughes as he turned away from the parking lot and walked back into the station like that’s where he’d been planning to go the entire time.

* * *

The Colonel Bastard was stupid but he wasn’t _stupid,_ not by a long shot. And even if Ed didn’t care to admit it, he was also trustworthy, at least by way of not giving too much of a shit about what Ed got up to outside of their weekly three o’clock meetings at Commanche’s. All it came down to was not having 25 hours in a day to teach himself an entire semester of organic chem on top of all his other weekday responsibilities in order to figure out the equations he’d copied from Heathcliff’s notes. Mustang, for all the time he spent peacocking his supposed intellect (and like, occasionally, answering Ed’s higher level chem questions, _occasionally_ ), should have been able to call upon his own weirdly specific breadth of knowledge to point Ed in the right direction once Wednesday rolled around.

But of course, that didn’t mean Ed still didn’t _loathe_ to ask the Bastard for help.

It would take a lot out of him, humility and compromise. To show up as early as possible, and like, politely greet the Bastard, rather than shoot his plastic straw wrapper at Mustang’s dumb face like he usually might. He didn’t even scowl, or glare, or otherwise make goofy faces at Mustang when he wasn’t looking, or when he was looking. Either worked.

Winry seemed satisfied with her trip to the station on Monday night, all in all, after she’d nearly tried to bust Ed’s skull open with a wrench over the equations page he’d swiped.

“I did my part,” Winry snipped at him, sitting on the carpeted floor of the room he shared with Al. She’d been looking over his fake leg for missing screws because she needed something to, quote-unquote, calm her down. “I went and got help from someone who’s job it is to wade through evidence for a living. And I could’ve taken care of _that_ —” she pointed to the crumbled paper of chemistry notes, sitting a few feet in front of her on top of a stack of Ed’s textbooks “—but someone had to show off his big brain!”

“It’s not about showing off,” Ed protested yet again, folding his arms from where he’d been perched atop his bed.

“Isn’t it, just a little, though?” Al interjected half-heartedly, reclined on the opposite side of the room in his own bed, face lit up by what Ed presumed was his Pokémon game.

Ed ignored the question. “It’s about Nina, it’s about Heathcliff, it’s about that school being shady as _fuck_ —”

“We don’t even know if all those things are connected.”

“We don’t know if they’re _not_ connected.” Winry looked up from the metal leg long enough to roll her eyes at him. “If the cases are connected to Central State like Mr. Hughes thinks they are, maybe we have a responsibility to figure out what the hell they mean _ourselves_ , instead of passing it off to someone else!”

“Well, good job, Edward, now it’s up to you to figure out what that mumbo jumbo means, because I can’t take withheld evidence back down to the station!” Winry pointed her screwdriver up at him, jabbing at the air with it for emphasis; Ed, equally mature, stuck out his tongue at her. “And last I checked, you didn’t have any idea what those equations meant!”

“Mr. Hughes didn’t have a page of chem notes in his case, isn’t that what you said, Winry?” Al asked; Winry bobbed her head in affirmation. “So would he have been particularly helpful on this front, anyway?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she replied to Al, but conversely, glared at Ed. “When Mr. Hughes doesn’t know the answer to something, sometimes he _phones_ a _friend_ who _does_.”

“Mr. Hughes” this, “Mr. Hughes” that. If Mr. Hughes was so helpful, did he also happen to know someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of applied chem—

Ed groaned involuntarily, the dread and disgust bubbling up before he could stop it, and suddenly he felt two pairs of eyes judging him where he sat. “I’m fine, I just—” he whined “—I realized have just the exact friend to phone.”

“Are you _kidding_ me?”

He already didn’t care to admit he couldn’t figure out the equations on his own, and the unknown variables surrounding the case absolutely unwilling to solve themselves. But it’d be a tightrope walk: venture too far out of their normal banter and Roy would inevitably start asking questions, too many questions. And between Heathcliff and the safe, Nina’s doll and her shoe, Ed, he loathed to admit, wouldn’t know how to answer questions he was also asking himself. No, Bastard, there _isn’t_ an obvious connection between this stupid unbalanced equation and the belongings of an old neighbor showing up in the woods, but we don’t know that there’s _no_ connection.

Keep your tin foil; Ed simply didn’t believe in coincidences, and he didn’t believe in leaving openings for the Colonel Bastard to snark his way out of being useful. He also didn’t believe in flattery, not that Roy needed the ego boost, but he also knew the “good-natured rascal” effect he tended to have on unwitting adults and maybe didn’t always play it down when he wanted something.

“You want something.” Ed felt pulled by his ponytail, neck snapped up to meet Roy’s scrutinizing squint from across the table, their working silence having almost been amicable for the first ten minutes of their meeting.

Damn. That was fast.

 _Don’t scowl, don’t scowl, don’t scowl._ “I just needed your help looking at something,” Ed conceded, setting down his flashcards and pulling out the page he’d copied containing Heathcliff’s five equations (the original, given that it was two steps away from disintegrating, let alone being legible, was at home inside his desk). He eased up a little as Mustang took one look to identify the scribbling as chemical equations and subsequently took to his bag to pull out a red pen, hunching over the page to carefully read line by line.

Before Ed could get too comfortable, however, Mustang had taken two looks. He’d taken two looks before he started running his hands over his face slowly, like in the palms was all the disdain he normally showed on Wednesdays from 3 to 4. Like he either didn’t know what he was looking at, and that was irritating to him, or worse, he knew exactly what he was looking at, and that was equally insulting somehow. Once his hands had come to rest on his chin, Mustang had been colored fully disgusted.

“Fullmetal.” The whistle came from the very back of his throat. It sounded strangely like defeat.

“Yes?”

Roy kept his hands steepled in front of his mouth, chin held up so that his eyelids looked closed, his eyelashes shrouding his pupils as he looked down upon the paper. “What am I looking at right now?” he asked, rather trivially.

“Uh,” Ed hadn’t really planned for a back-up, lest Mustang got stumped too? Maybe he wasn’t as smart as he posed, and Ed chuckled at that, “that’s kind of what I was hoping you could tell me?”

“Okay, let me rephrase then:” the smile fell from Ed’s face when Roy’s eyes finally flicked up to glare at him, “I do sincerely hope, for your sake, that this is a joke.”

“It’s not a joke,” Ed protested; however earnest, Mustang remained absolutely scrutinous, “it’s very serious.”

“So you’re _very seriously_ working with psychedelics?”

Record scratch, freeze frame. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, let’s start from the top,” the tip of Roy’s red pen circled the first of the five formulae Ed jotted up and down the page, “you’ll figure out in organic chem, but there’s a thousand and one isomers with the same formula, so you can just write the common name. In which case,” Ed watched as Roy crossed out the first reactant he’d circled, writing text in above it, “we can just call this ‘psilocybin’.”

Ed nodded fervently along as he carefully examined the edits that’d been written over the equations—it was dephosphorylation, of course, it wasn’t hydrolysis, and that’s where the missing phosphates went, duh—any more excited and he might’ve fallen out of his seat.

Roy was notably less enthralled with the discovery.

“You know, like the hallucinogen?” He asked Ed, slow and dumb, but Ed really didn’t know what he mea— “Magic mushrooms.”

_MILITARY ACADEMY STUDENT INDICTED FOR MANUFACTURING DRUGS IN COLLEGE APARTMENT_

Maybe he hadn't read the whole article Al had shown on his phone, maybe the journalist in charge of reporting Heathcliff's case had omitted the detail out of responsibility to the greater good, but Ed didn't know what drugs the Second Lieutenant had been charged with creating in the first place. Ed suspected, however, that he not only just found out, but that he found the recipe. And not only did he find the recipe, oh no, he handed it off to the one person who's word to Grumman stood between Ed, his dream of bright, fully-funded college career, and all that would entail for him and the people he cared about.

“Oh.”

Again, however inconvenient, it was the truth: The Colonel Bastard was not stupid.

“What did you say this was for again?” Roy asked, the innocence with which he used to inquire not matching the unrelenting hell gaze he tried to turn Ed into ash with. 

Ed sniffed, looking for a quick excuse, any excuse, “Extra credit.”

“Ah. Of course,” Mustang nodded and Ed could tell he was being mocked. He didn’t say anything and waited as Roy took his good old sweet time to lean back into his seat and fold his arms, before moving on with what he wanted to say next, “A word of advice, Fullmetal.”

The other truth about The Bastard was that he didn’t really offer advice, or ask, he just gave it unwarranted, usually in some snide way that’d give him a laugh. It was like he knew that if he started it a step below playing mother at the kitchen table over a plate of cookies, the faux concern would just irritate Ed more, especially when it inevitably disintegrated into some kind of jab, some kind of truth that Mustang just knew to be true and that Ed should follow without question. Pompous, obnoxious, know-it-all, cocky…

“You’re in a really good position right now, at this school. The opportunities at your fingertips are innumerable, and you’ve done an excellent job so far of taking advantage of what’s been given to you to do well, academically speaking.” Wait, was that a compliment? Ed never knew, Mustang liked to hide any and all compliments for him under a blanket, two blankets, a rug, a whole thick stage curtain, deep underground where no one else could find it. “All you have to do is keep your nose clean and in your own business and keep up the good work. That is all you have to do.”

“I don’t—”

“That is _all_ you have to do.”

And that was that; Mustang turned his attention back towards the sheet of paper to count atoms, leaving Ed somewhat slack-jawed at what may have been a real, genuine warning.

They worked in silence a bit longer, just a few minutes—Mustang working through the equations, Ed working on the same single flashcard over and over in anticipation— before Roy’s face shriveled up, and he muttered something rather incoherent under his breath.

“What was that?”

“This enzyme can’t be right,” Roy circled the “BG” written in the conclusion of the final equation, “are you sure you copied this right?”

“I’m sure.”

“This is going to bother me now, if I don’t figure this out.” Mustang’s pout deepened to a full frown, typing away at something on his laptop—Google, probably. “Though as is, you still don’t have enough information to synthetically make shrooms, which I feel better about.”

“I’m _not_ making shrooms—”

“Good, because I don’t know if they’ll let me graduate if you go to jail.”

“ _Wow_.”

Ed set down his flashcards and observed Mustang’s notes overlapping his own as they stretched out into the corners of the page. They were awfully detailed, if chicken scratch in some parts, for someone trying to be a lawyer and not a chemist. Ed wondered how his own handwriting still looked better than Roy’s, as though he hadn’t been the one to reteach himself how to write with his nondominant hand. “Hey, you’re like, kinda good at this.”

Roy shot him an accusatory glance.

“Kinda.”

A shrug, almost modest, for once. “You don’t have to sound so surprised, Fullmetal, I’m getting a chem degree in the spring.”

“ _Waitwaitwaitwait_ , really?”

“Yes?”

“I thought you were pre-law?”

“I am.”

“And chemistry, was like, maybe a hobby or something.”

Mustang shook his head like Ed was perhaps the stupidest person in this coffee shop, “I had time to double major—you really don’t listen to a thing I say, do you?”

That was decidedly untrue—Ed mulled over with crystal clarity all the details Roy had sincerely shared about his own life over their past few weeks together before realizing there’d been very few. Not many, not at all. “I mean, you haven’t mentioned what you’re working on that much, all I knew was that you’re going to law school next year.”

Another modest, noncommittal shrug. “I’m hoping to, anyway.”

“Why?” Ed pressed.

“So I can be a lawyer?”

“Yeah, but what made you choose arguing with people for a living and generally being the greater public’s least favorite kind of person—” that got a smirk out of the Bastard, good to know he had a decent sense of humor in there somewhere “—instead of, I don’t know, doing the fun thing and holing yourself up in some graduate chem lab? Blowing things up for fun?”

Now, there were a lot of replies here that The Bastard could have played off Ed’s attempt at a joke. Replies that would’ve made perfectly good sense. Replies that could’ve gotten him another good dig at Ed’s ego, that would’ve been short or to the point if he was really in some kind of mood, but instead, all he got in response was a curt, soulless: “It’s a long story.”

Ed shrugged, admittedly a little curious now. “We have time,” he offered.

“Trust me, Fullmetal,” Roy looked at him with a grave sort of seriousness, “we do not have enough time.”

* * *

Ling was no longer sore from his slip and fall on Sunday, but there was now a curdling purple bruise sitting along his backside that pinched and ached when he sat down and got up from his desk at school. This did wonders for both his comfort and his ego, as one could imagine. However, his butt wasn’t the only thing not sitting right with him after the squad’s little scavenger hunt on Sunday.

Let’s run through the facts: no one went that far up the Aquroya besides Ling and The Elrics and the rest of their friends, or at least that had been the supposed undeniable truth they’d all believed in before being aggressively denied. But Ling had discovered it first, learned they’d all been wrong just seconds before everything had gone to hell in a little girl’s daisy shoe, the moment to tell had just been swept up in the drama, faster than his feet could keep him held up.

The graffiti just didn’t lie, you know?

Before he’d fallen flat on his ass into the running water, he’d been looking up and down the stone tunnel by the creek that he’d taken to as his own personal canvas with Lan Fan at his side. She’d been tiptoeing along the right wall, him at the left, and their flashlights together could illuminate the whole tunnel, all the way down to the bars at the end that dropped off into the sewer. Returning now, a few nights later, it was hard to pretended like the woods weren’t much, much creepier in the whole darkness of seven o’clock at night. Ling tugged his hood over his head, missing rather absently the extra light Lan Fan provided and the ease with which he could move with the comfort of friends at his back.

It wouldn’t be long, is what Ling told himself as he traced his footsteps quick and deft, down the slope, past the trees, and ignoring the glowing cat eyes that followed him as he went. No headphones, as he usually might blast music during his painting incursions. This was serious.

In and out, he just needed to check and see that his eyes didn’t need to get checked—Ling thought maybe if he gave himself a laugh, it’d chase the immediate twinge of discomfort that’d hit his gut once he’d gotten to the black mouth of the cave he saw so often in the light. That he’d spent hours testing vibrant red and yellow and gold spray paints and designs and stencils in, proof of his handiwork surrounding him on all sides. He knew this tunnel inside and out, literally, and would’ve known exactly, without looking, where he’d slipped and fallen on Sunday, standing tip-toed on a shaky rock at an old tag of his that’d been written over.

An old tag that had been written over by someone else.

Sure enough—the section of wall he’d filled sitting on Ed’s shoulders, perfecting the flick of his wrist drawing yellow crowns, had been painted over with a single, masterfully drawn freehand. Ling stood back to give his flashlight a wide canvas; it was a circle, no, a snake, eating it’s own tail, standing out viciously on the wall in metallic silver paint, drawn over again in a forest green. It was scary, intentionally so, and maybe Ling would’ve been put off by that if he hadn’t been so pulled to the technique; he couldn’t paint like this now, even if he tried. The coil of the serpent’s body was almost three-dimensional, the eyes somehow piercing.

Beneath it, in cursive, was one-word.

“Who’s there?”

Record scratch, freeze frame. Ling froze, his only movements being the sink of his heart into his stomach, the bead of sweat rolling down his spine. He shifted his gaze to the very corner of his eyes and without his flashlight, could only see the outline of a tall figure standing just under the edge of the tunnel, face shrouded in darkness. Whoever they were, they were taller and broader than Ling, and in no attempt to make matters better for him, was carrying a baseball bat.

There was a lot to dissect here, wasn’t there?

Ling gulped away the lump accumulating in his throat, threatening to choke him out, before he called to the stranger: “You first.”

The broad shoulders on the stranger visibly shook before Ling could hear the chuckling, the deep and throaty laughter. “Are you The Yung Prince?”

Nothing. Ling said nothing, and focused on his breathing as the figure began to approach him. The click of boots to stone was rhythmic, the stranger walked with a swagger, dragging the bat along the rocky bottom of the tunnel. It was a metal bat, he could hear.

“Don’t make me ask again,” there was an edge there, sharp enough the draw blood, “are you the Yung Prince?”

_Click, click, click._

Ling nodded, fervently. The stranger said nothing, not bothering to hasten their strut as they took their free hand and slowly began to reach into their pocket…

There was a certain numb thrill to getting deeper and deeper in trouble, Ling noted over the years, that kept him from taking too seriously the reality of his worst predicaments. His worst predicaments usually didn’t involve exploring what he thought was remote area of the woods where strange personal items of strange people seemed to accumulate like flies to uncovered cake. As the mysterious figure with a baseball bat got closer and closer, the silhouette of his stalk not revealing any distinguishing features, it was apparent there was no obvious way for Ling to cartwheel or catapult out of this one. But he couldn’t bring himself to panic, that his muddy Nikes might be the next shoe his friends find out in the woods. He almost wanted to laugh. There really was no getting out of this mess, and that was just the fact of the matter. But the folly of his folly kept him from panicking, writhing and begging for mercy—things hadn’t really ever _not_ worked out for Ling before, why would his luck run out now? Even if there was no clear way to safety, why wouldn’t one open up to him? Didn’t that bat have just as much a chance staying close to the ground as it did colliding with Ling’s skull? No, it just couldn’t be him, and that was also the fact of the matter.

Like the single word painted on the wall to his left, he could have his cake and eat it too. So Ling kept his flashlight pointed to the ground, and the stranger stopped his clicking just outside the ring of light. They stood without breathing, the run of creek water echoing off the walls in lieu of conversation. Ling turned to face his inquisitor head-on.

The hand that’d been in the stranger’s pants pocket pulled something out quickly and brought it to their chest, something small and palm-sized. Not a gun, not the way they were holding it, but instead?

“Interesting,” said the stranger, and with one last click, they flipped on the light switch of their flashlight that rested just a few inches south of their chin, illuminating their face like a demon in the night. “Name’s Greed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> leave a comment! tell me your theories! follow me on tweeter @_roxast!!

**Author's Note:**

> You can yell at me on Twitter @_roxast


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